Andy Warhol, Before His First 15 Minutes of Fame

Andy Warhol, the inscrutably blank, bewigged icon of pop art, is known mostly for his work from the Factory onwards, the paintings of consumer goods and celebrities.Yet he was already a successful commercial and fashion illustrator long before he transformed the contemporary art world. In fact, he was a pioneer in the field, with his distinctive illustrative style marrying a natural hand-drawn line with a sharp eye for composition, color and negative space. Examples from this period, however, remain uniquely scarce. This is why a new show at CosGen, a private uptown gallery, is such a revelation. It gathers drawings completed by Warhol between 1955 and 1963. Taken from private collections, it contains many heretofore unseen and exceedingly rare portraits and other drawings in pencil and ink, including examples of his “blotted-line” technique. They cover the years Warhol endeavored to break out of his commercial shell and join the New York “high art” world. What is in evidence here is a pioneering, more freewheeling Warhol, who is nonetheless developing the techniques that would later establish him as the defining figure of pop art. ‘Females 1961,’ by Andy Warhol. Detail. Courtesy CrossGen Gallery. ScreenshotWhat we see here is limpid naiveté and prettiness floating atop a growing reservoir of ambiguity and irony. Warhol is already walking the knife-edge between propaganda, commercialism, and something genuinely compelling. His portrait of a young collector, an uptown New York heiress straight from the “Valley of the Dolls,” is flattering even as it teeters on the edge of caricature. His “Bacchus” legs akimbo and holding aloft sprigs of holly and juniper, is almost a printed folk motif (Warhol’s indebtedness to Rusyn/Slovakian folk art figures prominently in this period). Yet there is also something striking and a bit unnerving about his blank-eyed stare. Warhol’s ability to combine illustrative slickness with social subversion is also on display. His illustrations of slender figured “ladies” pushes fashion drawing into ambiguous territory; these might not be ladies at all. It prefigures his “Ladies and Gentlemen” transvestism series of the seventies, premiered at a time when such indefiniteness was genuinely boundary pushing. At other times we simply see his pure talent for encapsulating an era. It is hard to think of an image more emblematic of the naïve purity and promise of the early sixties than “Girl with Stars.” Warhol takes the languid, stripped-down drawing line of his French surrealist forbears and uses it to convey something entirely of the moment.‘Girl with Stars’ by Andy Warhol, 1958. Detail. Courtesy Cross Gen Gallery. ScreenshotOverall, we see Warhol’s signature illustrative methods used for different aims. One pioneering technique in evidence is Warhol’s use of the “blotted line” which combines drawing with basic printmaking. He traced a drawing in pencil on non-absorbent tracing paper directly onto absorbent Strathmore or watercolor paper. This produces a broken, or blotted, line. He then fills these lines in with Dr. Martin’s watercolor dye, his preferred coloring medium. The same drawing could then be wiped clean and used for repeated pressings, a foreshadowing of Warhol’s later use of silk-screened serialism. The stunning effectiveness of this is seen in his still life “Picnic,” which brings together his knack for effective placement, use of negative space and bold color. It transcends its own prettiness with its visual rigor and compositional intelligence, qualities that would continue to serve Warhol in the years to come. ‘Picnic,’ by Andy Warhol, 1958. Detail. Courtesy Cross Gen Gallery ScreenshotThe years during which Warhol produced the work in this show were not happy ones. He went from being an award-winning illustrator for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Glamour to being virtually unrepresentable in New York’s fine art world. During the height of Abstract Expressionism’s bourbon swilling, intellectual chest thumping, Warhol was a painfully shy, effeminate queer man who did fashion drawings. Even pop pioneers Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — who were also secretly lovers — shunned him from their company. After numerous rejections Warhol did land a show at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, and it was a disaster. Entitled “Fifteen Drawings inspired by the writings of Truman Capote”, it was inspired by Warhol’s obsession with the writer (he wrote him daily and stood outside his building), which drove Capote to describe Warhol as “…a hopeless born loser, the loneliest, most friendless person I’d ever seen in my life.” ‘Picture of a Collector,’ by Andy Warhol, 1963. Detail. Courtesy CrossGen Gallery. ScreenshotYet Warhol would persist through a combination of canniness, stubborn willfulness, and an incredible capacity for innovation and work. He also made the boldest and most unpredictable move of all. Instead of rejecting his commercial roots, the source of all the snobbish contempt from his “high art” peers, he embraced them. Warhol was willing to use the powerful appeal of the commercial image to drive the production of “serious art.”If Warhol knew one thing, it was how to make an image bold, iconically appealing, and instantly readable, if not brandable. In these nascent drawings we see the beginnings of his harnessing of “brand power” to his own ends. Warhol took the essence of whatever it was that compels us to reach for one brand of something over another — be it toothpaste, soup or glamour — and parlayed it into a new vision of the art object.As we know now Warhol would soon hit pay dirt after this period with his serial Marilyns and Campbell’s soup cans, becoming an overnight sensation and finally a self-created brand in his own right. He would go on to transform contemporary art, cinema, music and ultimately the culture. This quiet uptown show gives some clues as to how the “hopeless born loser” innovated his way into his unique position of impresario and icon. Still an enigma, but one who casts an oddly persistent shadow we have yet to fully reckon with.

Andy Warhol, Before His First 15 Minutes of Fame

Andy Warhol, Before His First 15 Minutes of Fame

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