Thom Nickels: Andy Warhol — the contrarian artist who redefined fame

It’s been almost 40 years since Andy Warhol died in Manhattan’s New York Hospital on February 22, 1987. Since his death, Warhol’s star has not faded. His works still sell for unprecedented prices: In 2002, “Green Car Crash” sold for 71 million; last year “200 One Dollar Bills” was sold at Sotheby’s for a cool 43.7 million, and the artist’s 1963 work, “Eight Elvises,” netted 100 million. 

Ask anyone on the street today what they think of when they hear the name Andy Warhol, and you’re likely to get different responses. Some see him as the hedonist filmmaker of the 1960s and 70s. Others see him as a mediocre artist who got lucky when he fused commercial and fine art and came up with his own artistic hybrid. Still others recall a manipulative artist who, while maintaining a rigid and highly disciplined work life, did nothing to “save” the hosts of men and women around him in the Factory who destroyed themselves with drugs in the name of “Art.”

When Warhol’s diaries were published in 1989, the world saw that the most outrageous artist of the 20th century was really a very conscientious workaholic who went to Mass every Sunday. The same man who made movies entitled “Heat” and “The Chelsea Girls” didn’t believe in modern (non-monogamous) marriages, and was very nearly celibate as a gay man. If one expected to find in Warhol’s diaries an endless litany of sexcapades in the style of the Ned Rorem Diaries or Paul Goodman’s famous sex diary, “Five Years,” they were sadly mistaken.

The great artist might as well have been a Trappist monk with an occasional penchant for voyeurism. In life, Warhol only posed as a jaded debauchee.  

As an artist, Warhol is mostly known for the pop phase of his work. He fused high art with low art. One of his major influences was Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school of architecture. Gropius believed that a “collective” of artists was necessary, because the arts had become “isolated” in modern times. To forge this new unity among the arts, Gropius founded (and designed) the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany, in 1925. Much like Andy Warhol’s New York Factory, the Dessau Bauhaus School was a hydra-headed endeavor. Students and teachers alike worked together on the design of buildings, furniture, teapots, wall hangings, table lamps, photography and advertising posters. Gropius’ vision of a synthesis of the arts, just as Warhol’s marriage of the fine and commercial art worlds, gave the world something brand new. 

But Warhol left the world of painting in 1965 in order to make movies. 

“I don’t paint anymore,” he said in 1966. “I gave it up a year ago and just do the movies now. I could do two things at the same time but movies are more exciting. Painting was just a phase I went through.”  

Warhol’s films, although they won awards among small artistic circles, never had the popularizing effect of his art. People did not line up for a Warhol premier.  

Like many famous artists, Andy eventually felt trapped by the public’s expectations of him. The public wanted him to produce more images of popular culture, but at this stage of the game he was getting sick of the non-stop parade of society portrait commissions that were coming his way.  He was also beginning to grow bored with his life of nightly clubbing in Manhattan.

Warhol’s future as an artist might have been different had he not met Jean-Michel Basquiat in the fall of 1982. Basquiat, originally a street artist, breathed new life into Warhol’s love of the paintbrush, and exerted enough influence that Warhol quit making movies after he made “Andy Warhol’s Bad” in 1976. The artist Keith Haring once said that “Andy trusted Jean even to the point that he would actually let him cut and sculpt his hair.” Warhol took Basquiat under his wing. Soon the two men were doing everything together, including filling the Factory with sweet smelling pot smoke.  

Before Warhol came on the art scene, the New York art world was ruled by the Abstract Expressionists. The Abstract Expressionists were exclusively male. The Abstractionists were also excessively macho, alcoholic, and homophobic. Warhol, who was anything but macho, did however find much to admire in the work of Jackson Pollock.

A lot has been written about the Jackson Pollock crowd. In his diaries, Warhol refers to them as “hard-driving, two-fisted types who’d grab each other and say things like ‘I’ll knock your f–king teeth out’ and ‘I’ll steal your girl.’ The toughness,” Warhol added, “was part of a tradition; it went with their agonized, anguished and often twisted art. They were always exploding and having fistfights about their work and their love lives.”

Pollack, who was very antigay, would greet every gay person he met with a sexual insult that cannot be printed here.  

But shy Andy couldn’t resist annoying these beefy Abstractionist thugs.

Despite his soft voice, he never ran from a confrontation. Perhaps this is why his friends called him Drella, a name that was a combination of Cinderella and Dracula.

“I certainly wasn’t a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme,” he wrote of his time with these guys. Rejected by the Abstract Expressionists for being homosexual and for his love of commercial art, Andy had no choice but to cultivate an artistic life as a contrarian. 

In the 1950s and 60s, Warhol made it his mantra to keep repeating that the “snobbish distinctions between fine and commercial (so-called high and low) art were no longer valid.”

“A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good,” he wrote in “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” Later, under the influence of Pollack and painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Warhol came to paint works of art like “Red Disaster,” 1985, a painting which clearly demonstrates his fondness for the so-called clean machine aesthetic.

A year before his death, he painted a series of self-portraits. He also began a rash of religious paintings, such as The Last Supper, and a slew of acrylic and silkscreen works like ‘Heaven and Hell are Just One Breath Away,” “The Mark of the Beast, and “Repent and Sin No More.” In these last paintings of his there exists the influence of his childhood experiences of going to his Pittsburgh Byzantine Catholic church with its egg tempera and gold leaf icons.

In an old You Tube clip of Andy’s graveside service, one can see elaborately vested Byzantine Catholic priests incensing the artist’s open grave. 

The Philadelphia Connection

Author Victor Bockris, when he was in Philadelphia to introduce a very bad Andy Warhol film entitled Kitchen, suggested I call a man named Carlton Willers, a Philadelphia resident who was Andy Warhol’s first intimate friend. 

Willers met Warhol when he was 20 years old and working as the secretary for the curator in the picture collection of the New York Public Library. Warhol used to come to the library all the time to borrow photographs for his work. 

“Lots of artists came in there. Andy was one of them and that’s how I met him,” Willers told me. “One day he came up to me and said, ‘You wanna go on a picnic with some people in Central Park?’”

The year was 1953. After the picnic, Willers says that he went to Andy’s apartment almost every evening. The two became instant friends.

“I often stayed there because Andy would work all night. He was doing ad work in those days and making lots of money. There weren’t that many art galleries then. It was a lot of fun for me and I helped him with a lot of that, as did a lot of people. He loved to go out to the theater. He would never go alone and I would always go with him. He liked the wonderful musicals of the 1950s. It was a lot of fun for me, a kid from Iowa who entered the Air Force and then went to New York.”

In those days Andy was living in a top floor apartment with his mother, Julia. Willers remembers Julia as being extremely funny and kind. He says everybody loved her because she was even more playful than Andy. 

“She was innocent and spoke this broken English and was always taking care of Andy. She was this old Czech lady. She was as funny as Andy and she loved to laugh. Andy had many cats then, eighteen of them. They were all named Sam. Some of them were inbred and many of them were cross-eyed. In those days Andy had a mess of stuff around him. There was always paper and art work because he was busy doing advertising, and the cats would come along and knock over whole bottles of India ink, but Andy never got upset. Then his mother would come in with this big bucket and mop — she just looked like a Czech chore woman. She had her bedroom in the back and she’d go to her Catholic church every Sunday.

“Andy’s ad drawings were very elegant and beautiful in those days and everyone knew it. Here’s this little boy – he really was a boy in those days with his cap on — literally, his shoe laces would always be broken and his tie would be askew but he’d walk into the Bonwit and Teller Ad Department and everybody loved him.”

Andy was obsessed with becoming famous and he’d often say, “Gee, I wish I could be famous,” though Willers doesn’t think that Andy ever thought he’d become as famous as he did.

He was also insecure about his looks. “I thought he was much too self-conscious. He hated being bald and his tendency to put on weight. He liked sweets a lot. Often after he was out running around the town he’d buy all these voluptuous cakes and pastries and he liked ice cream, and that got him through the night sometimes.” 

To hide his baldness, Andy wore caps in the 1950s. “He wouldn’t take the cap off,” Willers says. “We’d go to rather nice dinner parties with rather nice prestigious people and he wouldn’t take his hat off. He wouldn’t even take his cap off in the theater. One day I said, ‘Andy, why don’t you get a hairpiece or something?’ He actually did. He went to some place and got a very nice, well-matched hairpiece. He looked great in it. It looked like his real hair. Later, as his hair got completely white, he started going for white hairpieces.

“Later, Andy’s wigs would get crazier and crazier.”

When Warhol died, Willers was invited to the private memorial Mass at Saint Patrick’s cathedral but opted not to go. He wasn’t ready for all the hoopla.

“Once you get to a certain point,” he says, talking about Andy’s fame, “it feeds on itself and it gets bigger and bigger. Andy didn’t deal well with this towards the end of his life. He tried to keep up this persona. Had he lived to be old, where would that have gone? How could he take off these masks and be himself again? This would have been very difficult…everybody wanted him to be Andy Warhol. I think this happens to people who become famous and some people deal with it well and some don’t.” 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.