Andy Warhol

	Art is whatever you can get away with.
	- Somebody But Probably Not Andy Warhol

Despite the ubiquity of the above quote - or its variations - the actual source remains elusive. True, on the Fount of All Knowledge you'll read it is often attributed to Andy. However other scholars cite Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. So it's all the more perplexing that a perusal of the book - and even after using varied electronic searching for the quoted variants - has yet to reveal any such words.

But today a lot of people tour art museums and come across works by Andy Warhol. They see paintings of soup cans, soft drink bottles, and other consumer items. Among his most popular creations are the colorful portraits of celebrities.

But what has many visitors scratching their collective heads are his sculptures. One of his earliest and most famous - and aptly titled - is Brillo Box.

Huh!, the critics snort. Just a Brillo box put on a display stand? Call that art? Call that sculpture?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Andy's Brillo Box was not a Brillo box - or at least not one he bought from a store. They are real multi-media sculptures on wood. Andy had blocks of wood cut out to the proper size and using acrylic paint he added the lettering and design. So although his Brillo Box may be an unusual work of art, it's a work of art nevertheless.

But, but, but ..., the curmudgeons say. Are you saying copying a consumer product is art? It looks more like a mechanical exercise.

And since when, ask Andy's fans with arms akimbo, can a mechanical exercise not produce art? After all, much famous sculptures you see about the museums are copies of what was actually crafted by the artist. Even the originals are copies.

Ha? (To quote Shakespeare.) An original is a copy?

Yep. Although Michelangelo did a lot of the carving (but by no means all) himself, marble statues even by titans like Bernini or Rodin were first molded in clay by the artists. Then Gian and Auguste hired skilled stone carvers - the practiciens - to whack out the final statues that have received so much praise.

And indeed much of the carving was indeed a mechanical exercise. Some marble sculptures are created using what's called a pointing machine. That's sort of a low-tech 3D printer but where the stone carver does the printing.

As far as such sculpture being a mechanical exercise, you can argue as you like. Certainly some chap named Leonardo once wrote:

That sculpture is less intellectual than painting and that many wonderful aspects of nature escape him. Practicing myself sculpture as well as painting and doing both the one and the other with the same skill, it seems to me that without suspicious of bias I can judge which of the two is more intellectual, the more difficult, the more perfect.

For the sculptor in producing his work makes a manual effort. This demands a wholly mechanical exercise that is often accompanied by much sweat, and this combines with the dust and turns into a crust of dirt. His face is covered with this paste, and he is powdered with marble dust like a baker. He is covered with tiny chips as if it had snowed on him. His lodgings are dirty and filled with stone splinters and dust.

In the case of the painters just the opposite occurs. He sits at great ease in front of his work, well-dressed, moving a light brush with agreeable colors. He often has himself accompanied with music which he may hear with great pleasure undisturbed by the pounding of hammers or other noises.

OK. Andy made sculptures of Brillo boxes. But why Brillo boxes, for crying out loud?

Well, when you hear Andy explain his choice it makes a lot of sense. He simply believed that the boxes and other consumer products were items of beauty. After all, that's one of the reasons people buy them.

And if it's OK to make statues of flowers, landscapes, and naked people you think are beautiful, surely you can make a sculpture of an everyday object that's also beautiful. And at least people can look at a Brillo box and know what it is - not like some other - quote - "modern art" - unquote.

Now it is true that a major criticism of modern art is that it is simply not art. Sure, Michelangelo's Pieta - at one time it was modern art - is clearly art. And so is Pablo Picasso's Baboon, which is a metal collage of everyday objects welded together to look like, well, to look like a baboon.

But what about a clear plastic mannequin filled with cow manure? This was actually put on display at an art gallery in a large American city. Or a bunch of mason jars set up on a floor? That was exhibited in a major museum. Or what about a - quote - "painting" - unquote - which is nothing but a white canvas and which was displayed in the same museum?

Well, one good definition of art - albeit not a perfect one - is that art is something that most people recognize as art regardless of who created it. Certainly if Joe Blow from Saskatoon carved the Pieta, we'd still consider it a work of art. Although we probably wouldn't pay as much for it.

But if Joe Blow was to put a pile of paper cups on the floor of a museum, most people would think it was something left over from a reception. And likely one of the custodians would throw it out. But if, say Richard Roe, a "minimalist" sculptor, were to put the cups on the floor, the museum director would happily dub it art - even if it got accidentally thrown out later.

Andy's stuff, though, whether it's his drawings, paintings, or yes, his sculptures, are clearly art and would be considered so by anyone. Of course, Andy knew what art was as he had an excellent formal education in the discipline and was considered talented and skilled even when young.

Andrew Warhola was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh. As a kid he contracted scarlet fever and this produced what was called a "chorea" or involuntary muscle palsies. Sometimes this made attending school difficult. So when he was home he began to draw.

In general the slight and pale Andy was liked by the students and teachers. With his particular ability, he decided to go to Carnegie Tech which is now Carnegie Mellon University and in 1949 he earned his BFA. He then moved to New York where he hoped to find work as a graphic artist.

And Andy was good. Before he graduated he had shown some of his work to Tina Fredericks, the art director of Glamour Magazine. She told him to come back after he graduated and now she said she needed some paintings of shoes for some ads. But, Tina said, she needed them right away. Could he have them tomorrow? Sure, said Andy, and at 10:00 the next morning he brought it the work. After making a few corrections Tina bought the designs and Andy became a regular contributor to the magazine. He signed his work Andy Warhol - that is, minus the final "a".

Andy liked doing commercial art. There you simply drew what you were told to do and when to do it. He had no problem with making changes if asked (which a lot of editors liked), and he would create several versions of an assignment which allowed his clients to pick and choose. People also noticed that his work - even the shoes - had an individuality that was often lacking in commercial art. It's a bit ironic that drawing footware brought Andy to the attention of New York's fine art community but that's pretty much what happened.

Andy made friends easily although he was serious minded. When he moved to New York, he had a number of roommates (both men and women) and he had hoped that they would discuss weighty topics and share thoughts about each other's problems. Unfortunately, all they wanted to share was the rent. Among his early acquaintances was a young Truman Capote.

Andy's mom, Julia, came from Pittsburgh for a visit in 1952. She found her son living alone in a cheap rundown apartment. He had no bed, just a mattress on the floor, and clothes were laying around as were the many magazines he used for reference work. She figured he was probably subsisting on cake and candy. So she cleaned everything up and cooked him a few substantial meals. She briefly returned to Pittsburgh but soon relocated to New York and moved in with her son.

Andy continued to work on his commercial art but also on his own fine art projects. His first exhibit was a series of drawings. He also had painted a mural on the wall of one of his friend's room. But it was eventually painted over and so the owners of the builidng ended up losing an authentic Andy Warhol.

Like Norman Rockwell, Andy was a workaholic. He would get things done on time and so began attracting more clients. He would often make presents of his art to people who had hired him. Once he made a painted Easter egg for one of the art directors who was so impressed that he introduced Andy to an agent. The agent drummed up some big name clients and it didn't take long for Andy became one of the most successful illustrators in New York - a city replete with illustrators. From one of his clients alone he was soon making $50,000 a year - and that's in 1950's dollars. He even picked up some prizes for his work - at times to the irritation of some "serious" artists who also had to fall back on commercial work to make ends meet.

What many who met Andy noticed was his appearance. Pale by nature, his early infirmities had also left him with a somewhat blotchy complexion. Also by his late twenties he had become quite thin on top. He wore a hat to cover this up, but his friend, Carl Willers, told him that people thought he was rude by keeping his chapeau on indoors. He suggested that Andy get a hairpiece. That was fine and Andy found he preferred gray or white wigs because you couldn't tell how old he was. These tonsorial adornments certainly gave him a distinctive look.

Eventually Andy had so much work that he had to hire an assistant. He also drew on the help of his his mom Julia and also his friends. Usually he'd do the drawings and the others would help with the colors. His mom and his friends didn't get paid and Julia once complained that Andy made her work too hard. But all in all they got along well.

Andy looked for venues for selling his "serious" art. One of his favorite spots was an ice cream parlor called Serenpenity 3. The owners saw some of his drawings, and said that if he drew something that his advertising clients didn't want, they'd hang it on the walls and let people know they could buy it. These drawings and paintings usually sold for $25 to $100.

By 1960, Andy was successful enough to be living in a four story Manhattan townhouse. Naturally Julia moved in with him. He had also been trying to get his fine art into the more prestigious New York galleries. However his subject matter - which was often of men being affectionate - was not something that at the time had a big market. Although Andy never made any secret about his gender preferences (except, perhaps, to the traditional Julia), the gallery owners said that he needed to pick topics with more widespread appeal.

Another drawback was that in those years the modern art that was actually selling was abstract expressionism, that is paintings that looked like someone had randomly splashed paint over a canvas. But then one of the gallery owners told Andy that a new type of art was coming and would fit his technique. Roy Lichtenstein had been making and selling paintings that looked like enlargements of comic book panels. And he was doing pretty good.

Andy tried the comic book genre but his work really didn't seem to catch anyone's interests. He then went to an art consultant. For a fifty dollar fee she advised him to draw everyday objects. "Like a can of soup".

Andy's Campbell's Soup Can - there were more than one of these now iconic paintings - were first displayed at the Fergus Gallery in Los Angeles. The critics panned the show but the director of the gallery, Irving Blum, said he'd buy them anyway. So Irving bought the lot for $100 a piece - a total of $1000 (which he had to pay off in installments). But in the end it was a good bargain. In 1999 Irving sold them all to New York's Museum of Modern Art for a cool $7,000,000 - AND $7,000,000 in tax credits.

Why soup cans? Well, Andy was simply keeping with what we said before. He liked to draw and paint things that were beautiful. And he thought the cans were beautiful.

Besides he had always liked Campbell's tomato soup. He expanded his subjects to other popular objects. Almost inevitably, the art was called "Pop Art".

As to Andy's actual technique and method, it's pretty much how a number of other artists create photo-realistic paintings. First he would project a photograph of the cans onto a canvas. He would then trace over the image to get a line drawing. When that was done he would add the paint. Voila!, he had a painting of a soup can.

It is true that many non-artists consider this technique - that is projecting the image for tracing - to be "cheating". But if this is cheating, then a lot of famous artists have cheated. Although Renaissance artists didn't have access to modern projectors, they did have similar ways for making near exact copies. The "camera obscura" with a lens has been around since the 17th century, and the "Dürer" grid - a frame with strings going up and down and across - was a low tech alternative for simplifying perspective and keeping the proportions correct. The grid was certainly used by the early 16th century. Projecting a photograph onto a canvas or drawing paper is believed to have been used at least some times by the American artist Thomas Eakins in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Using his experience as a graphic artist, Andy developed other short cuts. His biggest time saver was screen printing. In screen printing a cloth - at one time made of silk but now usually polyester - is stretched over a frame and placed on the surface you want to paint. The paint - usually acrylic - is spread over the cloth and squeegeed through the cloth. But to get an actual picture, you placed a stencil on the cloth to block the parts of the canvas you don't want to paint. That way you could quickly put the color where you want. For more than one color, you use multiple stencils.

Stencils for screen printing can be made by cutting the patterns from a sheet of cardboard, paper, or plastic. This, though, is time consuming. Nowadays a more flexible method is to coat the screen with a special photosensitive emulsion and let it dry. Then you put a transparency of the image over the screen and shine a light on it. The light hardens the emulsion where it's exposed to the light and it forms a hard film. But where the light didn't shine (no wise remarks, please!), the emulsion doesn't harden and can then be washed away. The hardened film can be removed with certain solvents although it's sometimes easier just to stretch a new screen over the frame.

Not only does screen printing let you make rapid copies of a work of art, but it's also generally cheaper and far less laborious than lithography. Just put the stenciled screen over the surface where you want the print, put the paint on, and squeegee. Hey, presto! You have your picture.

Andy's soup can exhibit was in Los Angeles was in 1962. By 1965 Pop Art was mainstream and was even featured in articles in Life Magazine. Pop art quickly led to "Op Art" - more abstract and based on optical illusions - and soon both Pop and OP were gracing walls of big name corporations. Andy's studio became known as "The Factory" and was subject to some mutterings about "going commercial" as he began "cranking them out".

Of course, this was the 1960's, and after paintings, screen prints, and Brillo boxes, Andy branched into films. Naturally they had to be "art" films. His first picture was Sleep, showing a man asleep for over five hours. Empire is a film of the Empire State Building and runs for over eight hours. Another picture was called Taylor Mead's Ass although when it was reported in the news it didn't yet exist. So Taylor announced they were rectifying - no pun intended - the problem. Soon Andy released a two hour film showing exactly what the title said.

Things, though, did not always go smoothly. On June 3, 1968, Andy was shot and seriously wounded by one of his acquaintances. The assailant was later diagnosed as mentally ill. She spent three years in a minimum security prison and then faded from history.

Andy barely survived the shooting. After that, his health was never good. But he was still the most famous modern artist and he kept working for nigh on another two decades. He died in 1987, age 58, following what for anyone else would have been routine surgery.

Andy's first show with the Brillo boxes was in 1964. An interviewer told him that some people said the sculpture wasn't really original art.

"Would you agree with that?" he asked.

"Uhhh, yes," Andy replied.

The interviewer asked why did he say that.

"Well, because it's not original," he said.

And indeed the real Brillo boxes were designed in 1961 by artist James Harvey who specialized in creating commercial graphic designs. But by 1964 James had established himself as an abstract expressionist and was having his own shows. By most accounts when he saw Andy had used his design he just laughed it off. He also signed one of the original Brillo boxes - a real cardboard Brillo box - and gave it to the art historian Irving Sandler. It's now enclosed in a plastic case.

Andy made ten Brillo boxes for the 1964 show and more for a later 1968 exhibition. Today the originals have been selling for - get this - half a million or more, and in 2010 one box that had actually been signed by Andy went for $3,050,500. But in 1990 - three years after Andy died - a series of boxes were made in Sweden and out of wood - as Andy made his originals - and it's getting hard to tell Andy's originals from the copies. So if you see one of Andy's Brillo's on the market, check what art dealers call the provenance. If it has a 1990's date stuck in somewhere, caveat emptor! After all, millions of dollars don't grow on trees.

References

Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop, Jan Greenberg, Sandra Jordan, Delacorte Press, 2004.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, McGraw Hill, 1964.

Leonardo on Art and the Artist, Leonardo da Vinci, Orion Press, 1961 (Reprint, 2002, Dover Publications)

"Italian Cleaners Accidentally Throw Away Modern Art", Felicity Capon, Newsweek, November 10, 2015.

"A Tale of Two Art Dealers", Darcy Tell, east of borneo, March 4, 2014.

"The Brillo Box Scandal", Eileen Kinsella, Art News, November 1, 2009.

"Brillo Box (1961)", James Harvey, Dinosaurs and Robots, July 6, 2010.

"How My Father's Brillo Box Made $3 Million", Christie's.

"Aspects of Longevity of Oil and Acrylic Artist Paints", Frank Jones, Coatings Research Institute, Eastern Michigan University, Just Paint, Golden Artist Colors, Inc., December 1, 2004.

"Investigating the Drying Process of Acrylic Color and Gel Medium", Michael Townsend, Just Paint, September 1, 2012.