After The Party - Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986 (Art Ebook) PDF

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AFTER THE PARTY
ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 - 1 986
IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, DUBLIN
LUND HUMPHRIES PUBLISHERS, LONDON

The Irish Museum of Modern Art is grateful to all those who have helped with the exhibition in particular,
the Andy Warhol Museum, Mark Francis, Tom Sokolowski, Thomas Crow, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Margot
Heller, the Froehlich Collection, Art News, Yale University Press and Art in America, the Office of Public
Works, and the Department of the Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands.
The Museum is especially grateful to the sponsor ACCBank accBank lA

AFTER THE PARTY
ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 - 1 986

'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 1 986
CAT, 1950s Ink, dye, and printed material on paper, 221/2 x 15'/2 in. (57.2 x 39.4 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts In
FOREWORD DECLAN McGONAGLE
After The Party is a representation of Andy Warhol's >vork spanning the period from
the fifties up to his death in the mid eighties. It includes early drav\îngs using imagery
and techniques he developed as a leading 'commercial artist' of the day, the iconic
>vorks of the sixties and seventies and late pieces he made in the eighties, when his
vsôrk seemed suffused >vith an av\âreness of death.
It may be that the medieval idea of 'human folly' actually underpinned Warhol's >vhole
practice. But it is certain that, after the death of Marilyn Monroe in the early sixties
and the later attempt on his own life, he regularly produced pieces which subvert the
easy reading of his >vork and life as an uncritical, passive celebration of mass
consumer culture. After the Party sets out to explore that subversion.
Secondly it explores the paradox that Warhol came to represent the very thing his
work addressed, the commodification of culture and life. Warhol of course conspired
in this reading of his life and work but we, after the party, as it were, have an
opportunity and indeed a responsibility to read the artist's work in its totality and its
context.
Elsewhere in this publication Thomas Crow, looks at Warhol's work afresh. In a text
first published in Art in America in 1987 after the artist's death and revised for a book
of essays produced by Yale University Press in 1996, Crow argues that we should look
again at the actuality of the works. The text is reprinted in this context because it was
one of the first critical responses to go behind the screen created by the artist's
celebrity and his opaque public persona. Crow refocusses our attention on to the
works and their subjects.

AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956 1986
We also include an excerpt from the interview with G. R. Swenson in which Warhol
addresses his intentions as an artist, first published in What is Pop Art ? Answers
from 8 Painters, in ARTnews in 1963.
The implications of Warhol's practice are enormous and many artists have negotiated
a place for their own practice consciously or unconsciously in the shadovy^ of his art.
He raises questions about tradition, the role of the artist and mass culture in society as
well as posing a fundamental challenge to the traditional narrative of the artist. In the
period before Warhol became famous a generation of artists in Ne>v York had been
attached to a convenient definition of European tradition v\^hich confirmed the central
function of the 'hand' of the artist in the making and meaning of art. This model was
widely and consciously exported by the United States because one of its key
characteristics >vas to impose a distance between art/artists and social meaning. It
confirmed the primacy of expressionism as if there >vas some direct, inevitable and
inscrutable connection between the hand of the artist and his or her nervous system
and by implication the >vhole of humanity and that this is the only truth that art can
represent. If this is a perpetuation of an essentially 1 9th century set of values then
Warhol has to be seen as the epitome of a set of competing 20th century values.
He constructed a grammar of representation v>^hich mines the reservoir of meaning to
do >vith the darkness and light that surrounds life and death >vithout surrendering to
expressionistic modes of behaviour. This apparent technical passivity has been
mistakenly taken as a cue to his whole practice as an artist. In fact great art has
alv\âys been about communication rather than self expression.
As the idea v\^hich emerged >vith the Enlightenment became dominant - that truth vsâs
only accessible through reason, from science to social organisation, a parallel idea
was also generated - that truth in art >vas only accessible through irrationality and the
uniqueness rather than the commonality of the artist's experience. Andy Warhol
explores a landscape of commonality^ treating as true the outer v>ôrld of urban life in
v>âys normally reserved for an inner world of nature. The truth reserved for nature in
art is of course sustained by an assembly of conventions and interests including
pictorial codes which are man made. It is the absence of many of these codes and
conventions^ which most traditional art historians seek and celebrate in art, which
explains an inability or a refusal to recognise value in Warhol's work other than its
material success.
In passing through those conventions Warhol showed them up as constructs with
origins in social as well as cultural invention. Since human perception is also invented
and nature has nov\^ become culture what else can an artist do at the end of the
twentieth century but, as Warhol did, explore this man made world through those
elements in life which we experience in common but are most fugitive - beauty,
youth, fame, materialism and time.
In the midst of works which deal with these subjects it is possible therefore to
speculate about Warhol as a late twentieth century folk artist. By this I mean
someone who fulfils a role in society as a producer of artefacts and activities which
confront death by telling us we are alive. Warhol explored the things we, as
human beings, make and do to keep death at bay in the face of its inevitability.
The drawings of angels, which his mother Julia Warhola made and which Warhol
kept, somehow seem prescient. After The Party asks for the artist's work to be
read in this light.

'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 1 986
JULIA WARHOLA
CROSS, WINGED HEAD AND STAR TOP CENTER, (undated) Ink on paper, 12 x U^/s in. (30.5 x 37.8 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc.
JULIA WARHOLA
CAT WITH A HAT SEATED ON A HAT, (undated) Ink on paper, 17V4 x 14'/2 in. (45.1 x 36.8 cm.)
AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956 1986
FEET, 1950s Ballpoint pen on paper, 163/4 x 14 in. (42.5 x 35.6 cm.)
11
CROWD WITH COMMUNIST FLAG, 1950s Ink on paper, 22iVi6 x 28iVi6 in. (58.3 x 73.5 cm.)
12 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956 1986
STREET SIGNS, 1950s Pencil on paper, 1 1 Vs x 9 in, (30.2 x 22.9 cm.)

13
ICE CREAM DESSERT, 1950s Ink and dye on paper, 29 x 22Vi in. (73.7 x 58.1 cm.)
14 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 1 986
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RECLINING MALE NUDE, 1950s ballpoint pen on paper, I6V4 x 1 SVs in. (42.5 x 35.2 cm.)
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FLOWER AND WOMAN, 1950s Ink and dye on paper, I61V16 x 23^8 in. (43 x 60.6 cm.)
THE NATION'S NIGHTMARE, 1950s Ink and wash on paper, I4V2 x 14 V16 in. (36.8 x 36.7 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Saturday Disasters:
Trace and Reference in Early Warhol/ Thomas Crow
The public Andy Warhol was not one but, at a minimum^ three persons. The first and
by far the most prominent, was the self-created one: the product of his famous
pronouncements, and of the allowed representations of his life and milieu. The second
consists of the complex of interests, sentiments, skills, ambitions, and passions actually
figured in paint on canvas or on film. The third >vas his persona as it sanctioned
experiments in non-elite culture far beyond the world of art. Of these three, the latter
two are of far greater importance than the first, though they were normally
overshadowed by the man who said he wanted to be like a machine, that everyone
would be famous for fifteen minutes, that he and his art were nothing but surface. The
second Warhol is normally equated with the first; and the third, at least by historians
and critics of art, has been largely ignored.'
This essay is primarily concerned with the second Warhol, though this will necessarily
entail attention to the first. The conventional reading of his work turns upon a few
circumscribed themes: the impersonality of his image choices and their presentation,
his passivity in the face of media saturated reality, the suspension in his work of any
clear authorial voice. His subject-matter choices are regarded as essentially
indiscriminate. Little interest is displayed in them beyond the observation that, in their
totality, they represent the random play of a consciousness at the mercy of the
commonly available commercial culture. The debate over Warhol centers around the
three rival verdicts on his art: ( 1 ) it fosters critical or subversive apprehension of mass
culture and the power of the image as commodity; (2) it succumbs in an innocent but
8
telling way to that numbing power; (3) it cynically and meretriciously exploits an
endemic confusion between art and marketing.^
A relative lack of concentration on the evidence of the early pictures has made a
notoriously elusive figure more elusive than he needs to be - or better, only as elusive
as he intended to be. The authority normally cited for this observed effacement of the
author's voice in Warhol's pictures is none other than that voice itself. It was the artist
himself who told the world that he had no real point to make, that he intended no
larger meaning in the choice of this or that subject, that his assistants did most of the
physical work of producing his art. Indeed, it would be difficult to name an artist who
has been as successful as Warhol in controlling the interpretation of his own work.
In the end, any critical account of Warhol's achievement as a painter will necessarily
stand or fall on the visual evidence. But even within the public "text" provided by
Warhol, there are some less calculated remarks that qualify the general understanding
of his early art. One such moment occurred in direct proximity to two of his most
frequently quoted pronouncements: "I want everybody to think alike" and "I think
everybody should be a machine." In this section of his 1963 interview with G.R.
Swenson, he is responding to more than the evident levelling effects of American
consumer culture. Rather, his more specific concern is the meanings normally given to
the difference between the abundant material satisfactions of the capitalist West and
the relative deprivation and limited personal choices of the Communist East. The
sentiment, though characterized by the prevailing American image of Soviet
Communism, lies plainly outside the Cold War consensus: "Russia is doing it under
strict government. It's happening here all by itself...Everybody looks alike and acts
alike, and >ve're getting more and
more the same way/'^ These words
were uttered only a year or so after
the Cuban Missile Crisis and >vithin
months of Kennedy's dramatic,
confrontational appearance at the
Berlin Wall. It was a period marked
by heightened ideological tension, in
which the contrast of consumer
cultures observable in Berlin >vas
generalzied into a primary moral
distinction betv\êen the two economic
GREEN PEA and political orders. The bright light
and beckoning pleasures of the
Kurfurstendam were cited over and
over again as an unmistakable sign
of Western superiority over a
benighted eastern bloc. One had only to look over the Wall to see the evidence for
oneself in the dim and shabby thoroughfare that once-glittering Unter den Linden had
become. In his own offhand way, Warhol was refusing that symbolism, a contrast of
radiance and darkness that was no longer, as it had been in the 1950's, primarily
theological, but consumerist. The spectacle of overwhelming Western affluence was the
ideological weapon in which the Kennedy administration had made its greatest
investment, and it is striking to find Warhol seizing on that image and negating its
received political meaning (affluence equals freedom and individualism) in an effort to
CAMPBELL'S SOUP CAN (GREEN PEA), 1 968 One from a portfolio of ten screenprints on paper, 35 x 23 in. (88.9 x 59.4 cm.)
The Andy Warfiol Museum, Pittsburg, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
explain his vs/'ork. Reading that intervie>v now, one is further struck by the barely
surpressed anger present throughout his responses, as well as by its ironizing of the
phrases that would later congeal into the cliches. Of course, to generalize from this in
order to impute some specifically partisan intentions to
the artist >vould be precisely to repeat the error in
interpretation cited above, to use a convenient textual
crutch to avoid the harder work of confronting the
paintings directly. A closer look at such statements as
these, however, can at least prepare the viewer for
unexpected meanings in the images, meanings
possibly more complex or critical than the received
reading of Warhol's work would lead one to believe.
The thesis of the present essay is that Warhol, though
he grounded his art in the ubiquity of the packaged
commodity, produced his most powerful v\ôrk by

dramatizing the breakdown of commodity exchange.
These were instances in which the mass-produced
image as the bearer of desires was exposed in its inadequacy by the reality of
suffering and death. Into this category, for example, falls his most famous portrait
series, that of Marilyn Monroe. Complexity of thought or feeling in Warhol's Marilyns
may be difficult to discern from our present vantage point. Not only does his myth
stand in the way, but his apparent acceptance of a woman's reduction to a mass-
commodity fetish can make the entire series seem a monument to a benighted past or
an unrepentant present. Though Warhol obviously had little stake in the erotic
TWO MARILYNS, 1962 Silkscreen and pencil on primed canvas, 29 'A x M'/sin.
Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart.
21
fascination felt for her by the male intellectuals of the Fifties generation - Willem de
Kooning and Norman Mailer, for example - he may indeed have failed to resist it
sufficiently in his art." It is far from the intention of his essay to redeem v\^hatever
contribution Warhol's pictures have made to perpetuating that mystique. But there
are >vays in which the majority of the Monroe paintings, when vie>ved apart from
the Marilyn/Goddess cult, exhibit a degree of tact that withholds outright complicity
with it.
This effect of ironic displacement began in the creation of the silkscreen stencil itself.
His source was a black-and-white publicity still, taken from the 1953 film Niagara by
Gene Koreman. (The print that the artist selected and marked for cropping exists in the
archives of his estate. A portrait in color from the same session, in which the actress
reclines to one side and tilts her head in the opposite direction, was and remains today
one of the best-known images of the young actress, but Warhol preferred to use a
segment of a different, squarely upright pose. His cropping underlined that difference,
using the outer contours of her hair and shoulders to define a solid rectangle, a self-
contained unit at odds with the illusions of enticing animation normally projected by
her photographs. Its shape already prefigures the serial grid into which he inserted
this and the rest of his borrowed imagery.^
Warhol began his pictures within weeks of Monroe's suicide in August 1962, and it is
striking how consistently this simple fact goes unremarked in the literature.* Some of
the artist's formal choices refer to a memorial or funeral function directly: most of all,
the single impression of her face against the gold background of an icon, the
traditional sign of an eternal other world. Once undertaken, however, the series raised
issues that >vent beyond the artist's personal investment in the subject. Ho>v does one
handle the fact of celebrity death? Where does one put the curiously intimate
kno>vledge one possesses of an unknov\rn figure^ come to terms >vith the sense of loss^
the absence of a richly imagined presence that >vas never really there; for some it
might be Monroe^ for other James Dean^ Buddy Holly, or a Kennedy: the problem is
the same.
The beginnings of the Marilyn series also coincided v/\fh Warhol's commitment to the
photo-silkscreen technique, and a close link existed between technique and function.^
The screened image, reproduced vy^hole, has the character of an involuntary imprint. It
is a memorial in the sense that it resembles memory - sometimes vividly present,
sometimes elusive, always open to embellishment as >vell as loss. Each of the two
Marilyn Diptychs, also painted in 1962, lays out a stark and unresolved dialectic of
presence and absence, of life and death. The left-hand side is a monument; color and
life are restored, but as a secondary and unchanging mask added to something far
more fugitive. Against the quasi-official regularity and uniformity of the left panel, the
right concedes the absence of its subject, openly displaying the elusive and
uninformative trace underneath. The right panel nevertheless manages subtle shadings
of meaning v\îthin its limited technical scope. There is a reference to the material of
film that goes beyond the repetition of frames. Her memory is most vividly carried in
the flickering passage of film exposures, no one of vs^hich is ever wholly present to
perception. The heavy inking in one vertical register underscores this. The transition
from life to death reverses itself; she is most present where her image is least
permanent. In this v^ây, the Diptych stands as a comment on and complication of the
embalmed quality, the slightly repellent stasis, of the Gold Marilyn.

23
Having taken up the condition of the celebrity as trace and sign^ it is not surprising
that Warhol >vould soon afterv\ârds move on to the image of Elizabeth Talylor. They
vsêre nearly equal and unchallenged as Hollywood divas with larger-than-life
personal myths. Each was maintained in her respective position by a kind of negative
symmetry; by representing what the other >vas not. Also in 1 963, he completed a
dominant triangle of female
celebrity for the early Sixties
with a picture of Jacqueline
Kennedy, in the same basic
format as the full-face portraits
of Monroe and Taylor. The
President's wife did not share
film stardom with Monroe, but she did share the Kennedys. She also possessed the
distinction of having established for the period a changed feminine ideal. Her slim,
dark, aristocratic standard of beauty had made Monroe's style, and thus power as a
symbol, seem out of date even before her death. (That new standard was mimicked
within the Warhol circle by Edie Sedgewick, for a time his constant companion and
seeming alter ego during the period.) The photograph of Monroe that Warhol chose
was from the Fifties; through that simple choice he measured a historical distance
between her life and her symbolic function, while avoiding the signs of ageing and
mental collapse.
The semiotics of style that locked together Warhol's images of the three women
represents, however, only one of the bonds between them. The other derived from the
threat of actuality of death. The full-face portraits of the Liz series, though generated
GOLD MARILYN (TWO TONDOS), 1962 Silkscreen and gold paint on primed canvas, two parts, diameter each 45.3 cm.

by a transformation of the Marilyn pictures, in fact has an earlier origin. Liz Taylor's
famous catastrophic illness in 1961 - the collapse that interrupted the filming of
Cleopatra - had found its vsray into one of Warhol's early tabloid paintings. Daily Nev\^s
of 1962. During that year, the rhythm of crises in the health of both >vomen had joined
them in the public mind (and doubtless Warhol's as well). In Jacqueline Kennedy's'
case, he ignored, for understandable reasons, the v\îde public sympathy over her
failed pregnancy; but v^hen the traumatic triangle >vas completed >vith a vengeance in
November 1963, his response vsras immediate.
The Kennedy assassination pictures are often seen as an exception in the artist's
output, exceptional in their open emotion and sincerity, but the continuity they
represent with the best of his previous work seems just as compelling.' As with the
Marilyns, the loss of the real Kennedy referent
galvanizes Warhol into a sustained act of
remembrance. Here, however, he has a stand-in,
the wido>v vs^ho had first attracted him as an
instance of celebrity typology. Again, he limits
himself to fragmentary materials, eight grainy
news stills out of the myriad representations
available to him. These he shuffles and
rearranges to organize his straightforvsârd
expressions of feeling. The emotional calculus is
simple, the sentiment direct and uncomplicated.

The pictures nevertheless recognize, by their impoverished vocabulary, the distance
between public mourning and that of the principals in the drama. Out of his
JACKIE, 1 964 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 1 6 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.)
25
deliberately limited resources, the artist creates nuance and subtly of response that is
his alone, precisely because he has not sought technically to surpass his ra>v material.
It is difficult not to share in this, however cynical one may have become about the
Kennedy presidency or the Kennedy marriage. In his particular dramatization of the
ne>vsprint medium, Warhol found room for a dramatization of feeling and even a
kind of history painting.
The account offered thus far has been grounded in the relationships between Warhol's
early portraits. That line of interpretation can also be extended to include the
apparently anodyne icons of consumer products for which the artist is most renovs^ned.
Even those familiar images takes
on unexpected meanings in the
context of his other >vork of the
period. For example, in 1 963, the
year after the Campbell's soup-can
imagery had established his
name, he did a series of pictures
under the title Tuna Fish Disaster.
These are, unsurprisingly, lesser
known works, but they feature
the repeated images of a directly analogous object, a supermarket label can of tuna.
In this instance, however, the contents of the can hod killed two unsuspecting women
in Detroit, and newspaper photographs of the victims are repeated below those of the
deadly containers. The wary smile of Mrs. McCarthy, the broad grin of Mrs. Brown, as
each posed with self-conscious sincerity for their snapshots, the look of their clothes.
TUNA FISH DISASTER, 1963 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 68 x 83 in. (172.7 x 210.8 cm.)
glasses and hairstyles^ speak the language of class in America. The women's
>vorkaday faces and the black codings penned on the cans transform the mass-
produced commodity into anything but a neutral abstraction.
More than this, of course, the pictures commemorate a moment >vhen the supermarket
promise of safe and abundant packaged food vâs disastrously broken. Does Warhol's
rendition of the disaster leave it safely neutralized? While the repetition of the crude
images forces the spectator's attention onto the awful banality of the accident and the
ta>vdry exploitation by which one comes to know the misfortunes of strangers, they
do not mock attempts at empathy, ho>vever feeble. Nor do they insist upon some
peculiarly twentieth-century estrangement between the event and is representation:
the misfortunes of strangers have made up the primary content of the press since there
has been a press. The Tunafish Disasters take an established feature of Pop imagery,
established by others as well as by Warhol, and push it into a context decidedly other
than that of consumption. The ne>vs of these deaths cannot be consumed in the same
way as the safe (one hopes) contents of a can.
Along similar lines, a link can be made with several Warhol series that use
photographs of automobile accidents. These commemorate events in which the
supreme symbol of consumer affluence, the American car of the 1 950's, lost its aura
of pleasure and freedom to become a concrete instrument of sudden and irreparable

injury. (In only one picture of the period. Cars, does an automobile appear intact.)
Does the repetition of Five Deaths or Saturday Disaster cancel attention to the visible
anguish in the faces of the living or the horror of the limp bodies of the unconscious
and dead? One cannot penetrate beneath the image to touch the true pain and grief.
27
5 DEATHS, 1963 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 30 in. (50.8 x 76.2 cm.)
but their reality is sufficiently indicated in the photographs to expose one's limited
ability to find an appropriate response. As for the repetition, it might just as v/eW be
taken to register the grim predictability, day after day, of more events v/\\h an
identical outcome, the levelling sameness >vith which real, not symbolic, death erupts
into daily life.
In selecting his source material, Warhol >vas in no way acting as a passive conduit of
mass-produced images that were universally available. Far from limiting himself to
newspaper photographs that might have come his way by chance, he searched out
prints from the press agencies themselves, which only journalistic professionals could
normally have seen.^ (Certain of these were apparently deemed too bizarre or horrific
ever to be published; that is, they were barred from public distribution precisely
because of their capacity to break through the complacency of jaded consumers.)
Not long after his first meditations on the Monroe death, Warhol took up the theme of
anonymous suicide in several well-known and harrowing paintings. Bellevue I (1963)
places the death within a context of institutional confinement. Again the result
reinforces the idea that the repetition of the photographic image can increase rather
than numb sensitivity to it, as the viewer works to draw the separate elements into a
whole. The compositional choices are artful enough to invite that kind of attention. This
control, of course, could take the form of understanding the characteristic imperfections
and distortion of the process, that is, of knowing just how little they had to intervene
once the basic arrangement, screen pattern, and color choices had been decided. ^° In
the Suicide of 1 964, this orchestration of the void, all the fractures and markings
generated from the silk-screen process, becomes almost pure expressionist invention.
29
The electric-chair pictures^ as a group, present a stark dialectic of fullness and void. But
the dramatic shifts between presence and absence are far from being the
manifestation of a pure play of the signifier liberated from reference beyond the sign.
They mark the point where the brutal fact of violent death entered the realm of
contemporary politics. The early 1960s, following the recent execution of Caryl
Chessman in California, had seen agitation against the death penalty grown to an
unprecedented level of intensity." The partisan character of Warhol's images is literal
and straightforward, as the artist himself was wont to be, and that is what saves
them from mere morbidity. He gave them the collective title Disaster, and thus linked
a political subject to the slaughter of innocents in the highway, airplane and
supermarket accidents he memorialized elsewhere. He was attracted to the open sores
ELECTRIC CHAIR, 1965 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71 .1 cm.)
30 AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956 1986
in American political life, the issues that v\êre most problematic for liberal Democratic
politicians such as Kennedy and the elder Edmund Bro>vn/ the California Governor >vho
had allovsêd Chessman's execution to proceed. He also did a series in 1963 on the
most violent phase of civil-rights demonstrations in the South; in his Race Riot
paintings, political life takes on the same nightmare coloring that saturates so much
of his other vsôrk.
Faced with these paintings, one might take seriously, if only for a moment, Warhol's
dictum that in the future everyone >vill be famous for fifteen minutes, but conclude that
in his eyes it wâs likely to be under fairly horrifying circumstances. What this body of
paintings adds up to is a kind of peinture noire in the sense that adjective is applied to
the film noir genre of the Forties and early Fifties - a stark, disabused, pessimistic
vision of American life, produced from the knowing rearrangement of plup materials
by an artist who did not opt for the easier paths of irony or condescension. A picture
such as the 1 963 Gangster Funeral comes over like a dispatch of postcards from hell.
By 1 965, of course, this
episode in his work vsâs
largely over; the Flowers, Co>v
Wallpaper, silver pillows, and
the like have little to do with
the imagery under discussion
here. Then the cliches began to
ring true. But there >vas a
threat in this art to create a
cow WALLPAPER, 1 966 Silkscreen on paper, refabricated for the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg.
31
true '^pop'' art in the most positive sense of that term - a pulp-derived^ bleakly
monochrome vision that held, ho>vever tenuous the grip, to an all-but-buried tradition
of truth-telling in American commercial culture. Very little of >vhat is normally called
Pop Art could make a similar claim. It remained, one could argue, a latency
subsequently taken up by others, an international underground (soon to be
overground), v\^ho created the third Warhol and the best one.
1. There are as yet only fragmentary accounts of this phenomenon. For some preliminary comment, see lain Chambers,
Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture, London, pp. 30ff. 1
2. For an example of the first, see Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, trans. J.W. Gabriel, London: Thames and Hudson, 1970,
passim. For the second, see Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol, New York: Abbeville, 1983, passim. Andreas Huyssen, "The
Cultural Politics of Pop," New German Critique, iv. Winter 1975, pp. 77-98, gives an illuminating viev^^ of the effects of this
view in Germany. For the third, see Robert Hughes, "The Rise of Andy Warhol," in B. Wallis, (ed.). Art after Modernism,
New York: Godine, 1984, pp. 45-57.
3. In an interview with G.R. Swenson, "What Is Pop Art?" Art News, LXli, November 1963, p. 26. See also the comments
about this statement by his closest assistant at that time, Gerard Malanga, in Patrick Smith (ed.), Warhol: Conversations
about the Artist, UMI, 1988, p. 163:
...if you remember by reading that really good interview with Andy by Gene Swenson in '63, in Art News, where Andy
talks about capitalism and communism as being the same thing and someday everybody will think alike - well, that's a
very political statement to make even though he sounds very apolitical. So, think, there was always a political
I
undercurrent of Andy's unconscious concerns for politics, or of society for that matter.
4. De Kooning titled one of his Women series after her in 1954. Norman Mailer's fascination with the actress is rehearsed
at length in his Marilyn, A
Biography, London: Hodder, 1973.
5. The essential discussion of that grid, along with othe^^ key conceptual issues, is Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Andy Warhol's
One-Dimensional Art," in Kynaston McShine (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1989, pp. 39-57. An instructive comparison can be made between Warhol's neutralization of that mannered form of self-
presentation and Rosenquist's Monroe painting of 1962: for all the fragmentation and interference that the latter artist
imposes on the star portrait, its false seductiveness is precisely what he lingers over and preserves.
6. Crone, Warhol, p. 24, dates the beginning of the Monroe portraits in a discussion of silkscreen technique, without
mentioning the death. Ratcliff, Warhol, p. 117, dates the first portraits to August in a brief chronology appended to his text,
also without mentioning her death in the some month.
7. See Crone, Warhol, p. 24, who dotes Warhol's commitment to the technique to August 1962. The first screened
portraits, he states, were of Troy Donahue. Moco Livingstone, "Do It Yourself: Notes on Warhol's Technique," in McShine,
Warhol, pp. 69-70, discusses in further detail Warhol's turn to silkscreen techniques during 1962.
8. See, for example, John Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York, n.d., p. 52.
9. See Malanga interview in Smith, Warhol, p. 163.
10. This control, of course, could take the form of understanding and anticipating the characteristic imperfections and
distortions of the process, that is, of knowing just how little one had to intervene once the basic arrangement, screen
pattern, and colour choices had been decided. See the illuminating, if somewhat self-contradictory interview with Malanga,
in Andy Warhol's Art and Films, Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986, pp. 391-2, 398-400. See also Livingstone's remarks ("Do
Smith, It
Yourself," p. 72) on the ways in which the rephotographed full-size acetate would be altered by the artist ("for example, to
increase tfie tonal contrast by removing areas of image") before its transfer to silkscreen, as
half-tone, thereby flattening the
well as on the subsequent use of the same acetate to plot placement of the screen impressions before
and mark the intended
the process of printing began. Warhol's remarks in a conversation with Malanga [Print Collector's Newsletter, January-
February 1971, p. 126) indicate a habit of careful premeditation; he explains how the location of an impression was
established if colour was to be applied under it: "Silhouette shapes of the actual image were painted in by isolating the rest
of an area on the canvas by means of masking tope. Afterwards, when the paint dried, the masking tape would be
removed and the silk screen would be placed on top of the painted silhouette shape, sometimes slightly off register."
11. For a summary of press accounts of the affair, see Roger E. Schwed, Abolition and Capital Punishment, New York,
1983, pp. 68-104.
33
CREAM OF
CHICKEK
soyp
CAMPBELL'S SOUP CAN (CREAM OF CHICKEN), 1962 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 71 V" x 52 in. (182.2x 132.1 cm.
START
DANCE DIAGRAM, 1962 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 71 'A x 52 in. (181 x 132.1 cm.)
35
RtC-avPA-coF^
THREE COCA-COLA BOTTLES, 1962 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 1 6 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.)
36 AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956 1986
GOLD MARILYN (TWO TONDOS), 1 962 Silkscreen and gold paint on primed canvas, two parts, diameter each 45.3 cm.
37
d shipment: Did a leak kil
aleak kill.
SeUed shipment. Did
leak kill
IV J .
.-I, Seized shipment: Did a
Seized shipment: Did a leak kiU
1
. ."I
TUNA FISH DISASTER, 1963 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 68 x 83 in. (172.7 x 210.8 cm.)
JACKIE, 1 964 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 1 6 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm. each)
39
'*
-y^''*-'
HEINZ BOXES, 964 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on wood, 872 x 15V2x IOV2 in. (21.6 x 39.4 x 26.7 cm. each)
1
and on canvas, 22 x 28 (55.9 x 71 cm.)
ELECTRIC CHAIR, 1 965 Synthetic polymer paint silkscreen in. .
1
Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
The Andy Warhol Museum,
(Pages 42 & 43) SILVER CLOUDS, 1 966 Helium-filled metalized plastic film refabricated for The Andy Warhol Museum.
(Pages 44 & 45) COW WALLPAPER, 1 966 Silkscreen on paper, refabricated for the Andy Warhol Museum.
/ ^9kn
yi
<i ,sV,
"'
X "'^
GREEN PEA WITH

BEEF
VEGETABLES AND
„
BARLEY
CAMPBELL'S SOUP CAN, 1968 Portfolio of ten screenprints on paper, 35 x 23 in. (88.9 x 59.4 cm. each)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
47
ONION
'ÂDE WITH BEEF STOCK
PEPPER POT
The Andy Warhol Museum, 994 Gallery 401 4th floor.

(Page 48 & 49) MAO WALLPAPER, 9741 Silkscreen on paper. Refabricated for 1 ,
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy
(Page 49) MAO, 1972-73 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 82 x 61 in, (208.3 x 154.9 cm.)
for the Arts.
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center
^^
»
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, 1975 Portfolio of ten screenprints on paper, 4372 x 28V2 in. (1 10.5 x 72.4 cm. each)
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
51
r'
STILL LIFE (HAMMER AND SICKLE), 976-77 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas 72 x 86 in. (1 82.9 x 21 8.4 cm.
1
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts, Inc.
53
SKULL, 1 976 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 7Xli x SO'A in. (1 83.5 x 203.8cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts.
AFTER THE PARTY, 979 1 Screenprint on Arches 88 paper, 21 '/2 x 3O1/2 in. (54.6 x 77 .S cm.)
55
MYTHS, 1 981 Portfolio of ten screenprints and diamond dust on paper, 38 x 38 in. (96.5 x 96.5 cm. each)
THE WITCH, SUPERMAN, THE STAR, HOWDY DOODY, MICKEY MOUSE, THE SHADOW.
for the Visual Arts, Inc.
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation
DOLLAR SIGNS, 9821 Portfolio of 2 screenprints on paper, 40 x 32 in. (101 .6 x 81 .3 cm.) each.
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, In
57
GUN, c. 198 1-82 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 70 x 90 in. (177.8 x 228.6 cm.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, courtesy Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.
59
on canvas, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm.).

GUNS, c.1981-82 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, courtesy Anthony d'Offoy Gallery, London.
CROSS, 1982 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 90 x 70 in. (228.6 x 177.8 cm.)
61
BE A SOMEBODY WITH A BODY, c. 1984-86 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm.)
HEAVEN AND HELL, c. 1984-86 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.)
63
SELF-PORTRAIT, 1986 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 80 x 76 in. (203.2 x 193 cm.)
LAST SUPPER, 1986 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 78 x 306 in. (198.1 x 777.2 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc.
65
66 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956-1986
Andy Warhol - Interview v\îth Gene S>venson
First published in "What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters".
Art News, New York, November 1 963
AW: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike.
But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under
government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if
it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks
alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.
I think everybody should be a machine.
I think everybody should like everybody.
GS: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
AW: Yes. It's liking things.
CS: And liking things is like being a machine?
AW: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.
GS: And you approve of that?
AW: Yes, because it's all fantasy. It's hard to be creative and it's also hard not to think what
you do is creative or hard not to be called creative because everybody is always talking
67
about that and individuality. Everybody's alv/ays being creative. And it's so funny when you
say things aren't, like the shoe I would draw for an advertisennent was called a 'creation'
but the drawing of it was not. But I guess I believe in both ways. All these people who
aren't very good should be really good. Everybody is too good now, really Like, how
many actors are there? There are millions of actors. They're all pretty good. And how many
painters ore there? Millions of painters and all pretty good. How can you say one style is
better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract-Expressionist next week, or a
Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something. I think the artists who
aren't very good should become like everybody else so that people would like things that
aren't very good. It's already happening. All you have to do is read the magazines and
the catalogues. It's this style or that style, this or that image of man - but that really doesn't
make any difference. Some artists get left out that way and why should they?
GS: Is Pop Art a fad?
a fad, but don't see what difference it makes. just heard a rumour that G. quit
AW: Yes, it's I
I
working, that she's given up art altogether. And everyone is saying how awful it is that
and doing in a different way don't think so at all. If an artist

A. gave up his style is it I
then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his
can't do any more,
style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic
now - think that would be so great, to be able to change styles.

strips a year or two from I
think that's what's going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. That's
And I
screens now. think somebody should be able to do all

probably one reason I'm using silk I
haven't been able to make every image clear and simple and the
my paintings for me. I
would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that

same as the first one. I think it
no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else's.

CS: It would turn art history upside down?
AW: Yes.
GS: Is that your aim?
AW: No. The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that
whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
CS: Was commercial art more machine-like?
AW: No, it wasn't. I was getting paid for it, and did anything they told me to do. If they told
me to draw a shoe, I'd do it, and if they told me to correct it, I would - I'd do anything
they told me to do, correct it and do it right. I'd have to invent and now I don't; after all
that 'correction', those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have a style.
The attitude of those who hired me had feeling or something to it; they knew what they
wanted, they insisted; sometimes they got very emotional. The process of doing work in
commercial art was machine-like, but the attitude had feeling to it.
CS: Why did you start painting soup cans?
AW: Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years,
I guess, the same thing over and over again. Someone said my life has dominated me;
I liked that idea. I used to want to live at the Waldorf Towers and have soup and a
sandwich, like that scene in the restaurant in Naked Lunch...

69
We went to see Dr No at Forty-second Street. It's o fantastic movie, so cool. We walked

outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And
there was blood. I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over.
I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them - it's just part of
the scene - and hurting people. My show in Paris is going to be called 'Death in America'.
I'll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some
suicide pictures.
CS: Why did you star these 'Death' pictures?
AW: I believe in it. Did you see the Enquirer this week? It had 'The Wreck that Made Made
Cops Cry' - a head cut in half, the arms an hands just lying there. It's sick, but I'm sure it
happens all the time. I've met a lot of cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only
it's almost impossible to get pictures from them.
CS: When did you star with the 'Death' series?
AW: I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 1 29 DIE
I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been
Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio
they said something like, '4 million are going to die'. That started it. But when you see a
gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect.
CS: But you're still doing 'Elizabeth Taylor' pictures.
a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was going
AW: I started those
to die. Now I'm doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes.
70 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956- 986
1
My next series will be pornographic pictures. They will look blank; when you turn on the
black lights, then you see them - big breasts and... If a cop came in, you could just flick
out the lights or turn to the regular lights - how could you say that was pornography?
But I'm still just practising with these yet. Segal did a sculpture of two people making love,
but he cut it all up, I guess because he thought it was too pornographic to be art.
Actually it was very beautiful, perhaps a little too good, or he may feel a little protective
about art. When you read Genet you get all hot, and that makes some people say this is
not art. The thing I like about it is that it makes you forget about style and that sort of thing;
style isn't really important.
GS: Is Top' a bad name?
AW: The name sounds so awful. Dado must have something to do with Pop - it's so funny,
the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean
or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg - Neo-Dada for all these
years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use
-
are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage
has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham, too, maybe. Did you see that article
in the Hudson Review ['The End of the Renaissance?', Summer, 1 963]? It was about
Cage and that whole crowd, but with a lot of big words like radical empiricism and
teleology. Who knows? Maybe Jap and Bob were Neo-Dada and aren't any more.
History books are being rewritten all the time. It doesn't matter what you do. Everybody
just goes on thinking the same thing, and every year it gets more and more alike.
Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation,
and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will probably
be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

71
CS: Is Pop Art a counter-revolution?
AW: I don't think so. As for me, I got my subject matter from Hans Memling (I started with 'Portrait
Collages') and de Kooning gave me content and motivation. My work evolves from that.
GS: What influences hove you felt in your work from, say Dada?
When came across respected and though was pretty good; but didn't have
AW: I first it, I it it it
anything to do with me. As my work began to evolve I realized - not consciously, it was
like a surprise - that maybe it had something to do with my work.
was the same with Rauschenberg. When sawI his painting with the radios in it I thought
It
it was fine, OK., but it had no effect on me. It ceased to exist for me except in
Rauschenberg's world. Much later I got interested in the addition of movement to painting,
so a part of the painting was attached to a motor An interest in using light and sound
followed - I put in a television. But not only for the television image - who cares about
images? - but because cared about the dimension it gave to painting, something
television I
moved, and gave off light and sound. used a radio and when I did I felt as if I were
that I
the first who'd ever used a radio. It's not that I think of that as an accomplishment - it's just
Rauschenberg didn't seem an immediate factor in it. He was, of course; his use of
that
objects in paintings made it somehow legitimate; but I used a radio for my own reasons...
I've been painting more, lately, in these big works. I'm more and more aware of how
One of the reasons got started making collages was that

audacious the act of painting is. I
was painting; didn't have enough interest in a rose to

I lacked involvement with the thing I
I
comes from the painting of the fifties - mean, for a painter

paint it. Some of this, I think, I
was gone. don't love roses or bottles or anything like that enough to
the love of flowers I
72 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 - 986
1
want to sit down and paint them lovingly and patiently. Now with these big pictures, well,
there aren't enough billboards around and I have to paint a bowl - and I don't have any
feelings about bowls or how a bowl should be. I only know I have to have a bowl in that
painting. Here, in this picture I'm working on, I made this plain blue bowl and then I
realized it had to have something on it. I had to invent a bowl and - god! - I couldn't
believe how audacious it was. And it's threatening too - painting something without any
conviction about what it should be.
GS: Do you mean that collage materials permit you to use an image and still be neutral toward
the object represented?
AW: I think painting is essentially the same as it has always been. It confuses me that people
expect Pop Art to make a comment or say that its adherents merely accept their environment.
I've viewed most of the paintings I've loved - Mondrians, Matisses, Pollocks - as being
rather dead-pan in that sense. All painting is fact, and that is enough; the paintings are
charged with their very presence. The situation, physical ideas, physical presence -
I feel that is the comment.

73
Biography include work for Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller,
Harper's Bazaar, I. Miller, The New Yorker,
Seventeen, Tiffany & Co, as well as book jackets,
1928 window displays, Christmas cards and record
August 6, Andrew Warhola is born in Pittsburgh, covers. Shortens name from Warhola to Warhol.
Pennsylvania, to Andrej and Julia Warhola who 1950

married in 1 909 in Mikova, Czechoslovakia. Mother moves to New York to live with Warhol.
Andrej had emigrated to the United States in 1913, Fritzie Miller becomes his com-mercial art agent.
Julia in 1921 . Warhol has two older brothers, Paul Owns first television set.
(b. 1 922) and John (b. 1 925). At the age of six 1952
begins to collect signed photographs of film stars. Wins Art Directors Club Medal. Through 1 956
1934-40 continues to win national awards for work in
Attends Holmes Elementary School. In the late graphic design and art direction. Illustrates Amy
thirties suffers three nervous breakdowns. Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette with Fred
1942 McCarroll. First individual exhibition, 'Andy
Father dies of tuberculosis. Attends art classes at Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings
Carnegie Institute of Technology (CM), Pittsburgh. of Truman Capote', Hugo Gallery, New York.
1945-48 1953
Graduates from Schenley High School. Enters Publishes A is an Alphabet, There was Snow on
C.I.T. and studies pictorial design. Works as the Street and Rain in the Sky, and Love is a Pink
window dresser. Co/cewith 'Corkie' (Ralph Ward). Designs several
1949 backdrops for Theatre 1 2 group.
Graduates from C.I.T. and moves to New York City.
Drawings for 'Success is a Job in New York' are
published in Glamour magazine. Future
commissions in advertising and illustration will

75
1954 1960
Coca-Cola bottle pictures and first comic-
Publishes 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. Paints
a shop strip paintings, which include Batman, Popeye,

Sells drawings and books at Serendipity,
and restaurant in New York. Exhibits at Loft Superman and Dick Tracy.
Gallery, New York. 1961
Meets Henry Geldzahler Ivan Karp, art dealer,

1955
Wahrol's studio.
Publishes A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu with visits
Ralph Pomeroy, and In the Bottom of My Garden. 1962
Makes portrait painting of Troy Donahue,

Draws portraits in boll-point pen of Truman first
followed by Warren Beotty, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe

Capote, Jannes Dean and other celebrities.
and Natalie Wood. Also paints Campbell's Soup

1956
cans, dollar bills, and begins silkscreen paintings
Summer: travels around the world with Charles
important
personality shoe drawings of of disasters. Participates in Sidney Jonis's
Lisanby. Makes
New York exhibition of Pop Art. 'The New Realists'.
friends and famous people such as Judy Garland,
Individual exhibition at Eleanor Ward's Stable

Mae West and Elvis Preseley. Through 1 957 also
mokes line drawing portraits of young men. Gallery, New York.
1957 1963
Paints electric chairs, race riots, the Mono Lisa,

Publishes Gold Book. Forms Andy Warhol
and the Statue of Liberty. Begins Jackie Kennedy

Enterprises, Inc. Has plastic surgery to alter the
and Liz Taylor series. Buys first 1 6mm camera and

shape of his nose.
makes first films, including Sleep and Tarzan and

1959
Jane Regained... Sort of. Moves studio to 231 East
Publishes Wild Raspberries, o joke cookbook, with
47th Street, which becomes known as 'The Factory'.

Suzie Frankfurt.
Meets Gerard Malonga who becomes his assistant
and stars in many of Warhol's films.

1964 With Henry Geldzahler attends Truman Capote's
Makes first commissioned portrait of Watson 'Black and White Ball' at the plaza Hotel, New York.
Powell, an insurance executive. Also make Brillo 1966

Boxes and paints flowers and self-portraits. Continues painting self-portraits; makes Cow
Commissioned to make Mural of Thirteen Most wallpaper and Silver Clouds. Begins producing
Wanted Men for New York State Pavilion at New multimedia events called the Erupting (later
York World's Fair Mural is considered to be Exploding) Plastic Inevitable with Nico and The
politically controversial and is removed with the Velvet Underground. Filmmaking and Velvet
artist's consent. First European exhibition at Galerie Underground related performances become
Heana Sonnabend, Paris. First individual exhibition Warhol's main preoccupation.
at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. 1967

1965 Paints more electric chairs and self-portraits.
Paints coloured Campbell Soup's cans and electric Exhibits self-portraits at U.S. Pavillion of Expo'67,
chairs. Designs cover for Time magazine using Montreal. Meets Joe Dallesandro, Candy Darling
photobooth photographs. In Paris, announces and Fred Hughes, who becomes his business
retirement from painting and commitment to manager. A stranger with a gun threatens Warhol
filmmaking. Meets Paul Morrissey, Edie Sedgwick, and staff at The Factory, but escapes. Produces
Ultra Violet and the rock-and-roll band. The Velvet Velvet Underground's first album and designs its
Underground (Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker banana-peel record coven
and Sterling Morrison). The film producer Lester 1968

Persky gives 'The Fifty Most Beautiful People' party Factory moves to 33 Union Square West. Silver
at The Factory. Guests include William Burroughs, Clouds are used on stage for Merce Cunningham
Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Allen Ginsberg, Dance Group's RainForest. At the Factory, Valerie
Rudolf Nureyev and Tennessee Williams. Retro- Solanis shoots Warhol, who suffers major trauma
spective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary but recovers after lengthy surgery. From 1 968,
Art of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Paul Morrissey directs most of Warhol's films.
'
1969 1974
who becomes a key Moves to a townhouse on East 66th Street. Factory

Meets Vincent Fremont,
member of Warhol's staff for the next 1 8 years. moves to 860 Broadway.
Publishes first issue of his magazine., Interview, 1975
edited by Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, John The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B
and Back Again) published by Harcourt

Wilcock and Warhol. Undergoes further surgery is
relating to gun-shot wounds. Brace Jovanovich.
1970 1976-79
Selects works for the exhibition 'Raid the icebox 1

Paints skulls, athletes, hammers and sickles, torsos,
with Andy Warhol' at Rhode Island School of shadows, oxidation paintings. Retrospectives and
Design, Providence, from art in the School's own Reversals.
collection. Buys first Polaroid Big Shot camera 1980
'Portraits of the 70s' exhibition held at Whitney

which he uses to make portrait paintings.
1971 Museum of American Art, New York. Makes
Warhol's play, Pork, is performed in New York and diamond dust paintings (including portraits of
London. Warhol's mother moves back to Pittsburgh Joseph Beuys and Georgia O'Keeffe) and Ten
because of ill health. Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century. Jay Shriver
becomes Warhol's assistant and helps principally

1972
with the paintings. POPism: The Warhol 60s, by
Begins to work mainly on paintings. Fred Hughes,
Warhol Warhol and Pat Hackett, is published by Harcourt

other Factory staff and friends help to
obtain commissions. Begins Mao series. Mother Brace Jovanovich.
dies at the age of eighty.

1981-82
Paints crosses, dollar signs, guns, knives, and

1973
Myths series (which includes Superman, Santa
Continues painting Mao series. Appears with
Clous, Howdy Doody, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Sam,

Elizabeth Taylor in the film. The Driver's Seat.
Aunt Jemima, Dracula, Wicked Witch of the West

78 AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1956 -1986
and self-portrait). Exhibits paintings of Nazi 1987
architecture at 'Documenta 7' Kassel, Germany. Paints Beethoven and Rado Watches. Begins to
Cable television shows Andy Warhol's TV with work on the History of American TV. Dies on
guests such as David Hockney and Diana Vreeland. February 22 in New York following a complication
1983-84 during gallbladder surgery. Funeral takes place in
Designs poster of the Brooklyn Bridge for bridge's Pittsburgh where he is buried. Memorial service is
centennial celebrations. Makes paintings with held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. Andy
Francesco Clemente and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is
Paints details of Renaissance paintings, Edvard established.
Munchs, Rorschachs and Endangered Species
series. Bruno Bishofberger publishes Andy
Warhol's Children's Book.
1985
America by Warhol is published by Harper &
Row. Makes 'Ads' portfolio of screenprints using
commercial advertisements with stars such as
James Dean, Judy Garland and Ronald Reegan.
1986
MTV cable television shows Andy Warhol 15
Minutes, another series with short guest
appearances by celebrities. Paints Camouflage *For more detailed information, see the chronology
works and self-portraits, cars, flowers, Frederick prepared by Marjorie Frankel Nathanson in
the Great, Last Suppers and makes Campbell's Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, published by the
Soup Box paintings. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1 989.

79
.
80 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 - 986

1
Published by:
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Irish Museum of Modern Art ISBN 1 873654 59 6
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© Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Andy Warhol Museum and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts, Inc. and the authors
A co-publication of the Andy Warhol Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in association with Lund
Humphries Publishers, on the occasion of the exhibition "After the Party" Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986,
November 1997
The Andy Warhol Museum

117 Sandusky Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15212-5890
tel: (412) 237 8300
fox: (412) 237 8340
http://www.warhol.org/warhol
The Andy Warhol Museum is one of the Carnegie Musuems of Pittsburgh and is a collaborative project of
Carnegie Institute, Dia Center for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Andy Warhol images reproduced with permission from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 1997 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
All rightsreserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise
without written permission from the Andy Warhol Museum.
All works illustrated are in the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum unless otherwise stated
All works from the Andy Warhol Museum photographed by Richard Stoner, Robert Rushak and Paul Rocheleau.
Thomas Crow's essay reprinted courtesy of Yale University Press and Art in America
Andy Warhol Biography reprinted courtesy of Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Andy Warhol: Interview by G.R. Swenson excerpted from What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 painters, part 1
Copyright ©, ARTnews, November 1 963, reprinted courtesy of the publisher.
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IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN

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VEDERE IIBURON LIBRHflt

3 1111 01713 BB90

NDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 - 1 986

IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, DUBLIN

LUND HUMPHRIES PUBLISHERS, LONDON

The Museum is especially grateful to the sponsor ACCBank accBank lA

ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 - 1 986

vs^ork seemed suffused >vith an av\^areness of death.

works and their subjects.

from 8 Painters, in ARTnews in 1963.

attached to a convenient definition of European tradition v\^hich confirmed the central

characteristics >vas to impose a distance between art/artists and social meaning. It

represent. If this is a perpetuation of an essentially 1 9th century set of values then

He constructed a grammar of representation v>^hich mines the reservoir of meaning to

expressionistic modes of behaviour. This apparent technical passivity has been

alv\^ays been about communication rather than self expression.

art is of course sustained by an assembly of conventions and interests including

In passing through those conventions Warhol showed them up as constructs with

youth, fame, materialism and time.

read in this light.

STREET SIGNS, 1950s Pencil on paper, 1 1 Vs x 9 in, (30.2 x 22.9 cm.)

Trace and Reference in Early Warhol/ Thomas Crow

and critics of art, has been largely ignored.'

clear authorial voice. His subject-matter choices are regarded as essentially

1 'AFTER THE PARTY' ANDY WARHOL WORKS 1 956 1 986

endemic confusion between art and marketing.^

sentiment, though characterized by the prevailing American image of Soviet

more the same way/'^ These words

were uttered only a year or so after

the Cuban Missile Crisis and >vithin

months of Kennedy's dramatic,

confrontational appearance at the

Berlin Wall. It was a period marked

by heightened ideological tension, in

which the contrast of consumer

cultures observable in Berlin >vas

generalzied into a primary moral

distinction betv\^een the two economic

GREEN PEA and political orders. The bright light

and beckoning pleasures of the

Kurfurstendam were cited over and

over again as an unmistakable sign

of Western superiority over a

received political meaning (affluence equals freedom and individualism) in an effort to

order to impute some specifically partisan intentions to

the artist >vould be precisely to repeat the error in

interpretation cited above, to use a convenient textual

crutch to avoid the harder work of confronting the

paintings directly. A closer look at such statements as

these, however, can at least prepare the viewer for

unexpected meanings in the images, meanings

possibly more complex or critical than the received

reading of Warhol's work would lead one to believe.

The thesis of the present essay is that Warhol, though

he grounded his art in the ubiquity of the packaged

commodity, produced his most powerful v\^ork by

These were instances in which the mass-produced

series, that of Marilyn Monroe. Complexity of thought or feeling in Warhol's Marilyns

this and the rest of his borrowed imagery.^

is a memorial in the sense that it resembles memory - sometimes vividly present,

embalmed quality, the slightly repellent stasis, of the Gold Marilyn.

vs^ere nearly equal and unchallenged as Hollywood divas with larger-than-life