Warhol biographer reveals “little-known facts”
As if Andy Warhol isn’t well-known enough, Artnet News asked his biographer Blake Gopnik to share “little-known facts that help explain who Warhol really was.”
One of those facts seemed especially splashy. Despite the soup cans that catapulted him to fame, Warhol had gourmet tastes. By way of illustration, Gopnik cited a Thanksgiving in the 1950s when Warhol cooked pheasant under glass” instead of turkey.
Warhol was also an early devotee of sushi back when most Americans were not. In Gopnik’s words, “Warhol was never much of a true participant in popular culture, despite the subjects he chose for his art.”
With this information, you’re left wondering how this epicurean ended up picturing canned soup. Oddly, Gopnik left out this part of Warhol’s story.
But the answer shows up in the 2009 biography, “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” by Tony Scherman and David Dalton. The artist’s close friend Ted Carey told the biographers that the idea for the soup cans came from interior designer Muriel Latow, who was paid $50 for it.
Carey said that Warhol was desperate to make it big in the art world. Seeing the huge success of Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoons, he told Latow, “It's too late for cartoons. I've got to do something that will have a lot of impact, that will be different I don't know what to do! Muriel, you've got fabulous ideas. Can't you give me an idea?''
To help him Latow asked him what he liked most in the world. But Warhol needed her to tell him that, too. “What do I like most in the world?'' he asked her. “Money,'' she said. “You should paint something that everybody recognizes . . . like a soup can.”
The rest is history. My apologies to Warhol fans that I’m not. If art is food for the soul, in his hands, it's stale and deifies detachment.
This is not to say that Pop art is not art. It was perfectly valid when it first burst onto the scene out of rebellion against abstract expressionism's messy inwardness.
It was no accident that Warhol used silkscreen prints for his host of celebrity portraits. With such a reprinting technique, he could reproduce an image over and over for the most stale impersonal look.
He repeated his images in mechanical reproduction ad nauseum with photographic enlargements that he silkscreened onto canvas. He made wallpaper-pattern reproductions of these, glorifying their sameness/
He repeated the look not only with Campbell soup cans, but also with Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, and the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband's assassination. Warhol made wallpaper-like copies of her, too. And in that repetition, he numbed our perception. He gave us aesthetic emptiness.
Warhol said that anything is boring if you look at it long enough. He said he loved being bored and that he wanted to be a machine - blank and cold.
Clearly, he wasn’t the only one with a yen for blank and cold. In 1996, MoMA in New York purchased Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans for $15 million.
His slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the emotional excesses of Baroque running to it for relief.
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