WHAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T SEE ABOUT WARHOL

CP: Warhol had an enormous impact on me as a college student in upstate New York in the 1960s. I have proudly called myself a “Warholite” ever since. It is baffling how Warhol could ever be called “bourgeois” because he was the product of a poor immigrant family in industrial Pittsburgh, and he boldly brought the dissident sexual underground into then-stuffy major museums in both Manhattan and Philadelphia. He surrounded himself with male hustlers, drug addicts, drag queens, and decadent, androgynous socialites. Warhol was openly gay long before the birth of the gay liberation movement. He was contemptuously ostracized as “swish” by closeted gay artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in New York.

Neither would I accept the term “blasé” about Warhol, since that implies a far more sophisticated and affectedly fatigued persona than the one he projected. A colleague said that Warhol pretended to be “the village idiot” — that is, a dysfunctional, marginalized, passive observer of society. Warhol’s primary response to anything that interested him was “Wow” — the exact opposite of blasé. He was a voyeur who voraciously consumed mass media and who identified himself with the popular audience. Many of his early large-scale pictures were blow-ups of tabloid newspaper photos of automobile or airplane accidents. What he was demonstrating was the saturation of society by the sensationalistic visuals of modern media — a return to a primitive form of consciousness that pre-dated literacy.

To continue with the adjectives you have proposed, I see nothing “irreverent” in Warhol either. On the contrary, he transferred the religiosity of his youth in Eastern Rite Catholicism to his passionate reverence for Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, whom he turned into shimmering saints in an updated Byzantine style. “Marilyn Diptych”, the subject of a chapter in my book, is really a giant icon screen like the one in Warhol’s baptismal church in Pittsburgh. Similarly, those who see irony in Warhol’s acrylic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans are simply imposing their own contemporary preconceptions backwards onto him. Warhol, who began his career as a commercial illustrator, loved brand-name logos and saw them as modern heraldry. Campbell’s soup cans were beautiful to him — exactly as they were to me as a child growing up in the sooty factory town of Endicott, New York. I used to cut out colorful logos from magazine ads and play with them like paper dolls.

Camille Paglia

Huffington Post

November 7 2012