Scanning the Bookshelf

Why would we need or want another book on Andy Warhol? The question is inevitable, given the multiple biographies, critical studies and Warhol's own stream of books he assembled or co-wrote during his lifetime. Then, there are the books about or by people who were part of his large circle at "The Factory" in the 1960s, be they actresses in his films or artists who assisted him in some way.

Improbably, though, Gary Indiana's "Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World" is a fresh portrait of the artist — for those who want to know why his paintings of soup cans altered the course of recent art history and those who are curious what all the noise, pro and con, was about, nearly 50 years ago, when these deadpan images began the process of making him the most famous artist this side of Picasso or Norman Rockwell.

No one has dissected Warhol's complex personality better. And no one has written more concisely and accessibly about him.

Indiana cuts to the core of why we should be interested, even if we don't like Warhol's work, writing: "In the 20th century, perhaps only Picasso left a comparably prodigious and variegated body of work and therefore there will always be more to say about it," declares Indiana.

But unlike Picasso, who was making a reputation for himself by his early 20s with his Blue Period pictures, Warhol didn't become a transformative figure until he was in his 30s. Despite his intense ambition, Warhol was, as Indiana points out, "virtually the last major Pop artist to be 'discovered.'"

His breakthrough came in 1962, with a solo exhibition in Los Angeles' Ferus Gallery rather than in New York, where pop peers like Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist had already had shows. The Ferus exhibition contained 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans, one per canvas and one for each variety of the manufacturer's soup that existed at the time. (They are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.)

Warhol craved fame; someone who comes up with the endlessly quoted quip "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" is clearly obsessed with the notion. These paintings began to fulfill his wish. His celebrity status leapt ahead of art world recognition when he guided a photographer to a supermarket and signed real cans of soup for him. The Associated Press distributed the image across the world.

His 15 minutes had begun.

You can get a far more detailed account of that exhibition in other books. What Indiana gives you, above all, is a penetrating perspective on the show and the work.

He crystallizes their strange power: "They were banal. They were visionary. They were works of obdurate stupidity radiating the aptness of genius. They have never lost their iconic punch, perhaps because they transmitted the banality of a specific, familiar object into a wink of nonconformity. ... "

They were ignored at first and then ridiculed in the popular press, which only made them more famous. Warhol himself became a kind of media magnet, ready with another quip or another comment on his work, provocative or amusing in its blandness — pithy statements like "Art is what you can get away with" or "Pop art is about liking things."

His deadpan personality, his seeming detachment from feeling, only seemed to fuel the fascination about him.

Indiana is very good on Warhol's early years in Pittsburgh — marked by an intense closeness with his mother Julia, which carried into his adult years when she came to live with him in New York. Their relationship went a long way toward shaping his personality. He was seen as the gifted child; Julia smothered him with love and also criticized him cruelly. Reportedly, his father's dying wish was that his savings be used to send Andy to college (he studied to be an artist at Carnegie Tech), while his two brothers would get no such support.

Warhol was an outsider to the art scene in the 1950s, after arriving in New York. His openly gay personality and fey style of drawing were perfectly acceptable in the world of commercial illustration; he was highly successful in that realm. But not so in the macho art world, which was dominated by abstract expressionists.

Along with his rise as pop artist was the emergence of a tougher-looking, more detached Warhol, who wore leather jackets, wigs, sunglasses, boots and jeans. Still, as Indiana points out, he never concealed his sexual identity.

Indiana manages to pinpoint what made Warhol's peak era (approximately, 1962-67) so indelible; these were the years in which he produced his iconic images of Marilyn, Elvis and Jackie (first names were enough) along with his versions of disasters and riots. Indiana is also good on Warhol's decline, not seeing it as a simple line downward, but a period in which he produced some good works and a lot of forgettable ones.

Yet it is his work from the 1960s to which Indiana returns at the end of his book, concluding "The world is a different story" because of it. Such artists are few and far between. This is why Warhol still matters.

To find out more about Robert L. Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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