Andy Warhol adman exhibition at AGNSW looks behind the brand

The exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work in advertising reveals a man of many contradictions.

A Dior work and part of the Adman: Warhol before pop exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

It has always been easy to misunderstand Andy Warhol, especially for lazy admirers who are attracted to an ostensibly facile ­nihilism or the dismissal of high art and the challenges of tradition. But in fact little about Warhol is what it seems: the elaborately crafted persona of his mature years was, in the original meaning of the word persona, a mask. It was partly self-defence, partly a paradoxical but implicitly critical performance; but certainly only a fool takes a mask at face value.

After Warhol’s death almost exactly 30 years ago — February 22, 1987 — there were surprising revelations, particularly in his friend John Richardson’s eulogy and a subsequent article in Vanity Fair. It emerged that from his youth and throughout his adult life Warhol had been a devout Catholic who attended mass sometimes daily, supported charities and even helped out in soup kitchens.

Equally surprising was the suggestion he quite probably remained a lifelong celibate: a homosexual who could photograph himself in drag and who apparently surrounded himself with sexual and other excess, but remained aloof, an asexual ascetic in the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Factory and of contemporary New York. How could all this be reconciled with the image of cool and amoral cynicism he had seemed to cultivate in public?

Andy Warhol in New York City (c.1949) by Philip Pearlstein.

In fact the combination of nihilism and spirituality is far from unusual: in many traditions and throughout history, we encounter a radical critique of the world of the senses and the claims of reason as a preliminary demolition of the commonsense understanding of the world designed to turn our attention to the superior reality of the transcendent.

The zen cultivation of paradox has precisely such a purpose: the koan are puzzles intended to bring reason to its knees and open the mind to another kind of consciousness. In the 17th century, the brilliant French philosopher Blaise Pascal undertook to demonstrate the limits of rational thinking to his intellectual contemporaries and thereby prove to them the necessity of faith. And more recently even Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction has been associated with mystical perspectives beyond the realm of deconstructible discourse.

It is almost equally surprising to realise Warhol was one of the backers of the New York Academy, which was founded in 1980 with the aim of restoring the rigorous teaching of classical drawing, among other skills that had been increasingly lost in modern art schools. What was Warhol doing sponsoring classical drawing? To most schoolchildren or art students who admire him, and even to their teachers, his work seems to represent an excuse not to apply oneself to traditional art training. Yet clearly things are once again not what they seem. Warhol’s work was not slapdash; his collaborators at the Factory were expected to be highly skilled craftsmen, expert in their various tasks.

And the object of Warhol’s aesthetic critique was not primarily traditional art. His work has little to do with such ubiquitous and hopelessly vacuous cliches as “pushing the boundaries”. His mature work is concerned to reveal to us the new world of consumer products, brands and the objectification of people, especially of celebrities, in the mass media.

It is a world in which mass-produced objects such as soup cans, for example, become as real a part of our environment as natural or living things, perhaps more real for many people, since their daily sustenance comes to them mass-produced and processed, and from supermarket shelves, not from the earth. It is no coincidence that Warhol’s most characteristic images of this new world of mass manufacturing came at the climax of two postwar decades of expanding material prosperity and concomitant alienation from nature, and just before the hippie and countercultural revolt of the late 1960s and the 70s.

Warhol’s world is also one in which the increasing blandness and sameness of mass existence are compensated by the fantasies of stardom, in which celebrities are turned into instantly recognisable but empty images on to which existentially starved masses can project their dreams and longings. Warhol seems first to have fully understood this after the suicide of Marilyn Monroe in 1962.

The famous images he produced immediately afterwards, based on a studio promotional photograph for the film Niagara (1953) printed in lurid colours, memorably evoke the way the real woman was hollowed out in the process of being turned into a mass consumer fetish. The Marilyn Diptych (1962) in particular, which set rows of gratuitously coloured heads against rows of black and white ones, more or less darkened into illegibility, poignantly captured the dual fate of stardom: public hyper-visibility and inward, private extinction.

Warhol later repeated the formula far too often. The true sequel and in a sense corollary to the Marilyn portraits is to be found in the Screen Test series he began soon afterwards. There is a clue to the continuity in the fact he liked to call his subjects, though sometimes little known, “superstars”, a term he is said to have invented.

Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol made about 472 short films of actors, artists, models and other friends, mostly sitting motionless and looking straight into the camera. The series was filmed using a 16mm film camera and a single 30m spool of film, shot at 24 frames a second (standard for sound films) but projected at 16 frames a second, producing a slow-motion effect that is only barely visible because of the stillness of the subjects, but which does add a slightly uncanny quality to unavoidable movements such as blinking.

One of the most striking of the series is the three-minute film of Edie Sedgwick (1965), a young and beautiful heiress from an old American family who became a close associate of the artist, but who suffered from psychological disturbances as well as drug and alcohol addiction, and ended up dying at only 28, six years or so after this film. One can’t help feeling Warhol looks at Edie, although virtually unknown, as another Marilyn in whom he can observe and record the emptying out of the superstar in a process of cinematic vivisection.

For all the critical meanings we can read into Warhol’s work, however, there is never any hint of overt ideological intent. He was the antithesis of the angry politicised artists who would soon arise in the 70s, denouncing the evils of capitalism, the consumer society, patriarchy and so on. On the contrary, Warhol would insist his work meant nothing, was commercial, had no ulterior ideas or intentions, and that the very definition of pop was “liking it”.

This too can be seen as a kind of defensive mask, akin to Jeffrey Smart’s refusal to admit his paintings of highways, trucks and anonymous apartment blocks were meant as images of the alienation of the modern world. When pressed, Smart like Warhol replied that he simply liked these motifs, even found them beautiful. The truth is more exactly that he made them beautiful, but the point is he knew an artist’s opinions are irrelevant: what matters is only what is revealed in the work.

So Warhol’s seemingly radical detachment and lack of feeling were at once a self-defensive, indeed dandyish persona and a way of letting his work speak for itself rather than encumbering it with extraneous ideological baggage. It must be admitted however, that his posture of sustained irony and apparent cynicism could also have a negative effect on less discriminating admirers.

What Warhol did in the years before he found his true vocation as an artist is the subject of a very interesting exhibition that comes to the AGNSW from the Warhol Museum in his birthplace, Pittsburgh. It is not an exhibition of artistic masterpieces, or indeed of works that would necessarily command our attention if they were not from the early years of an artist who became so influential, but they are often inventive and quirky, sometimes elegant and sometimes erotic; and some of them show the artist on the cusp of articulating his mature themes.

Warhol studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and moved to New York at the end of 1949 to work in the advertising business. Early photos show a fair young man in a light suit and bow tie sauntering down a summery street, looking exactly the part of a young adman, though as we gather from several modified photographs, self-conscious about a bulbous nose. There he fell in with other young homosexuals employed in fashion, advertising and retail, eager but sexually disinterested workers in the industry of feminine glamour.

Examples of his early work in illustration and publicity range from a group of women climbing ladders to accompany a series of articles about ways a woman can be successful, to fashion designs and even shop windows. They are lively and quirky images that are very much of their period, while alluding to the whimsical forms of certain modernists such as Paul Klee.

Often Warhol’s early work is accompanied by decorative hand lettering, a slightly old-fashioned and uneven cursive that was the work of his mother. And this is another thing that may come as a surprise: Julia Warhola (1891-1972) lived with him until 1970 and was a close collaborator. The effect of the lettering, as in Jean Cocteau’s work, is to add a personal touch in a world of mechanical reproduction; the characteristic blotting technique of his early drawings has a similar function.

Later works in the exhibition, including several artist’s books and sketchbooks, venture from commercial illustration into fine art and begin to explore, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, a homoerotic sensibility. In style we can see reflections of Cocteau and Matisse’s line drawings; but it is really at the end of the exhibition, when Warhol begins to experiment with reproductions of found images in newspapers, that he approaches his own distinctive themes.

The exhibition reminds us that when Warhol made art about commodities, he had a long experience of the consumer market, although his own preference — to the point of obsession — appears to have been for luxury items such as women’s footwear, while his art was concerned with mass products such as soup, beverages and cleaning products. It also reveals that while a talented young man, he did not have the depth of ability to be a truly original draughtsman or painter.

Like Duchamp, who was also a painter of limited talent, Warhol found a solution in a kind of meta-art, which was a significant moment in the culture of the 20th century but was not an example that could be followed by others. In Hegelian terms, both Duchamp and Warhol represent moments of negation, aesthetic antitheses that are not to be imitated and repeated, but answered with a new affirmation and synthesis.

Adman: Warhol before Pop

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until May 28