From A to E: Warhol\'s Europe/Europe\'s Warhol (JEPC Special Issue Intro)

JEPC 7 (2) pp. 103–106 Intellect Limited 2016

Journal of European Popular Culture Volume 7 Number 2 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Introduction. English language. doi: 10.1386/jepc.7.2.103_2

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Introduction Gary Needham University of Liverpool

From A to E: Warhol’s Europe/ Europe’s Warhol Getting to Europe was a running theme in the sixties – everyone was either just coming back or just about to go or trying to get to go or trying to explain why they weren’t already there. (Warhol and Hackett 1980: 76)

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The subtitle for this special issue, Warhol’s Europe/Europe’s Warhol, marks a process of reception, interpretation, translation and exchange between the artist Andy Warhol and Europe. What is Warhol’s interest and relation to the ‘E’, Europe, and similarly what is Europe’s interest in Warhol. The son of immigrants from Ruthenia (now part of both Slovakia and Ukraine), the Warhola family, and the American art figure most associated with a reification of American consumer culture and celebrity. The most American of artists or at the very least an artist whose art is the most American. After all, what could be more American than Marilyn Monroe, dollar bills, and Pepsi? And why is Warhol appearing in the Journal of European Popular Culture? These rhetorical gestures are not provoked to force Warhol on the readers of the journal rather, they are conceived to challenge the mythology of Warhol’s life and work which is often axiomatic, monolithically American and even more specific, a New York phenomenon. This is not to dispute the centrality of American popular culture and New York in Warhol’s life, obsessions, and work as much

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as it is to think about different contexts, narratives and ways of seeing the ‘e’ in/and/of Warhol. We consider less obvious work or neglected relationships, we argue for more complex and nuanced understandings of America’s most famous artist, in part, constituted by a constellation of Europeans (Nico, Yves Saint Laurent to name only a few we deal with here) and related subject matter (communism, fashion, ballet). Nonetheless, Warhol’s Europe was also a force of repression, even embarrassment, in his New York life with only the closest of friends and lovers allowed in the presence of Mrs Warhol or to know that he was really Andrew Warhola; the lost ‘a’ to which the title of this introduction also refers. Despite keeping his immigrant Mother remote from the Factory scene, she is responsible for much of the swirly calligraphic writing in his early art. Warhola and Warhol, mother and son, New York and Europe, drawing and writing, Warhol’s work speaks of their secret intimacy and collaboration, and perversely, despite being an openly gay artist, for Warhol’s swish couldn’t be hidden like the ‘a’ in his surname, it is Europe that remains closeted. But, like all closets, as Sedgwick (1990) reveals to us, the standard operating procedure is a war between secrecy and disclosure. It is our intention with this special issue to disclose more of the Europe in Warhol and to think about the ‘a’, not so much directly, but as as a metaphor of what is often missing or misunderstood or dropped in pedestrian accounts of Warhol, the American artist par excellence. From the 1960s onwards Warhol regularly exhibited in Europe and some of the key exhibitions in Warhol’s career have taken place there. A landmark in this respect was the 1968 retrospective at Stockholm’s Modern Museet, an exhibition that also toured Norway, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The museum still sells reproductions of the original 1968 exhibition posters that are comprised of favourite Warholisms such as ‘I like boring things’, ‘I never read I just look at pictures’ and ‘In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes’. The legacy of the Swedish exhibition even generated a 40th anniversary retrospective in 2008. An exhibition that again went around to Amsterdam, London and Stockholm and sought to contextualize Warhol through ‘706 item in 2 hours and 56 minutes’ (Meyer-Herman 2008) ranging from art, film, sculpture, television and video, to everyday ephemera. One of Pop Art’s major European collectors and dealers, Paris gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, a champion of American post-war art in the 1960s staged three Warhol exhibitions in Paris in 1964, 1965 and 1967 (Richardson 2009). Even today the Sonnabend collection is a major lender for Warhol exhibitions worldwide and includes numerous canonical examples of his Pop art such as Liz #1 (1963), the electric chair Silver Disaster #6 (1963) and the blue Nine Jackies (1964). Warhol followed his own career very closely, retained every column inch in a series of press clipping scrapbooks, and the volume of material taken from European periodicals and newspapers suggests how much Warhol enjoyed the chronicles of his European reception. His awareness of how much he was known in different European countries certainly informed his later business practices and the people he received and courted for his lucrative portrait business. We would also note that the first scholarly book, the first of many Catalogue Raisonee of Warhol’s work, was written by the German art historian Rainer Crone as his Ph.D. (1970). Crone was first scholar to properly devote research time in examining Warhol academically within a single volume, his study has Marxist leanings, and perhaps Crone’s place as an outsider to the United States lent his insights the perspicuity that was missing from American accounts on Warhol’s art practice. We, similarly,

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1. Warhol had tremendous financial success in Germany with a trilogy of films (Flesh [1968], Trash [1970] and Heat [1972]) he produced and Paul Morrissey directed. They were top-ten box office titles in the German domestic film market.

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From A to E

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are European scholars writing about Warhol and have often discussed the geographical, cultural, and institutional difficulties of ‘doing’ research on the most famous of American artists. Crone was the first to bring together Warhol’s fine art and his films and subsequently in his later book Crone devoted considerable space to the earliest of Warhol’s work in the 1940s and 1950s (1988). Crone’s innovative thinking to see the entirety of Warhol’s work, especially Warhol’s cinema and the pre-Pop material, as the one artistic oeuvre was radical for a discipline that was still keen to maintain a compartmentalized approach to medium specificity and periodization. The publication of Crone’s book in Europe and the many exhibitions that took place on a yearly basis offered Warhol a scale of European exposure denied to other American artists of his generation. The popularity of Warhol’s art in Europe is often allied to it being a critique rather than celebration of American culture and even as early Deleuze offered a singular reference in 1968 to Warhol’s seriality as ‘repetitions of habit, memory, and death’ (1994: 294). Measurable too was Warhol’s presence in the European art market and on German film screens1, and the and number of commissioned portraits that followed in the 1970s and 1980s attest to Europe’s fondness for the artist. A bulk of Warhol’s late portraits in the 1970s and 1980s are of European aristocracy as well as numerous European artists and fashion designers (Armani, Versace) of which Rees-Roberts in this issue explores through the figure of Yves Saint-Laurent. Warhol often travelled to Europe to undertake some of his European commissions and he even produced several films there such as L’amour (1973) featuring and filmed in Karl Lagerfeld’s Paris apartment. There was also the Italian-lensed horrors Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) that established a European career for Factory beefcake Joe Dallesandro who later appeared in films by Serge Gainsbourg, Walerian Borowczyk and Aldo Lado. But some clients also came to Warhol no doubt to boast that they had visited the famous Factory despite it not being The Factory but the new more business-like premises on Union Square West. For a time, it seemed that Warhol became Europe’s society portraitist. Warhol had a fixed-fee of $25,000 per screen print and $5,000 for every additional print (Dedichen 2013). Perhaps, Europe saw in the Warhol’s aesthetic, one that was now ‘art history’ in the United States, something that couldn’t be found in European portraiture at that time. Or that the European portraits evoke a centuries long tradition in which the wealthy commissioned portraiture but now with Warhol’s acid colours and the assocaited pizazz of New York at the height of disco and Studio54. The paintings of the aristocrats, princesses and queens recall his most famous works of Pop Art women (Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe). Warhol’s European commissions were an important source of income for his business enterprise especially when his work was at its least popular in the United States. None of Warhol’s Dollar Sign (1981) paintings sold in the early 1980s (Fairbrother 2004). At the same time Warhol’s Dollars had lost their value in the American art market, Reagan and the New Right was on the rise and disco was rejected by all but the gays. However, the ideological shifts and foundational sentiments that ushered in the New Right in the United States had already seeped into popular culture leading us to consider if this a reaction to the fact that Warhol turned to more un-patriotic subject matter. A few years before the Dollar Signs Warhol made a series of Skulls (1976–77) and Hammer and Sickle (1976–77) paintings that Davis explores in his essay? Another example of the scope of Warhol’s work and the least Pop of subjects: communist politics. Yet, it is

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precisely the seriousness of overtly political subject matter, communism as a brand that allowed Warhol to exercise a subversive and unexpected playfulness in turning such an indexical brand into new capital. One wonders if that it was grated Frederic Jameson whose obnoxious comparison of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980–81) with Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots (1887) verges on being a straw man (1991). First, Jameson is oblivious to Warhol’s history of drawing shoes, the gay milieu to which the many of the shoe works belongs, and the context of their execution (Merk 1996; Halberstam 2005: 99–101) and second, he maps upon Warhol an artificial conceptual polarity between Europe and America, and modernism and postmodernism. As Needham argues in his essay, those distinctions between Europe and America are central to the complex relations between Warhol and Nico, the German actress and singer who was close to the centre of Factory life and art throughout 1966 to 1967. As the three essays in this issue attest, where American ends and Europe begins for Andy Warhol is an act of secrecy and disclosure across production and reception, exhibition and criticism, of locating the missing ‘a’ in a discovery of ‘e’. And in Warhol’s own words, ‘if it weren’t for the plane ordeal I’d like to be in Europe one day a week’ (1975: 166).

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References

Butt, G. (2005), Between Me and You: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, Durham: Duke University Press. Crone, R. (1970), Andy Warhol, London: Thames and Hudson. —— (1988), Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the Artist, New York: Rizzoli. Dedichen, H. (2013), Warhol’s Queens, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press. Fairbrother, T. (2004), ‘ABC Dollar’, in Christophe Van de Weghe (ed.), Andy Warhol Dollar Signs, New York: Van de Weghe Gallery. Halberstam, J. (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Jameson, F. (1991), Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Merk, M. (1996), ‘Figuring Out Andy Warhol’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathon Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 224–37. Meyer-Herman, E. (2008) (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items in 2 Hours and 56 Minutes, Rotterdam: NAI publishers. Richardson, B. (2009), ‘Ileana and Andy: A story in counterpoint’, Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection, New York: Rizzoli, pp. 11–39. Sedgwick, Eve K. (1990), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Warhol, A. (1975), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, New York: Harcourt Brace. Warhol, A. and Hackett, P. (1980), PoPism: The Warhol Sixties, New York: Harcourt Brace. Gary Needham has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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