Above: 'Unidetified Male Portrait' 1952, and 'Female Head, Unicorn and Flowers,' circa 1957
And how would you describe his drawings? His drawing style?
When he graduated in 1949 he was very influenced by the German artist George Grosz, who was teaching actually in and around Pittsburgh at that point. Andy did a painting called 'The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose,' and he put that into the local juried art fair and it was summarily tossed out and one of the judges on that art fair was George Grosz, who was a champion of him and defended it. And then around 1950 or 51, he was influenced by the American artist Ben Shahn who was certainly well known at that point, and when Andy started doing commercial work, starting very early in the 50s, you can start to see Ben Shahn-esque techniques as far as like the nose and things like that. He didn't maybe invent the blotted line technique, but he was a master of the blotted line, which is a form of prep-making where you trace over your line with ink and then you put it on a piece of paper when the ink's wet, you then press down on another piece of paper to make the image. He also was very good at the pen and ink drawing in ballpoint. He did a lot of male portraits in ballpoint pen. You could find similarities to Matisse, who he certainly was looking at. Paul Klee was an influence. He was very astute in art history. He knew it well.
What is your opinion of all of these shows happening at the same time about Andy Warhol?
Here's the thing. You have the Whitney, the beautiful show that Donna De Salvo did and that was the first retrospective in New York City since 1989 when the Museum of Modern Art did one curated by Kynaston McShine. So this whole generation, they didn't see a big body of work at one time. I curated a show in 2006 with Larry Gagosian at his gallery called 'Cast a Cold Eye,' which dealt with scale and paintings from 1972 to the end of his life in 87. So there have been shows, but I think it's kind of great. I did a show at the New York Academy to kind of echo and open a dialogue between the Whitney show and the drawing section. So people could go to the Whitney, see those drawings, and then if you want more depth, go to the New York Academy, we had another hundred and thirty drawings in that show. The one at the Sperone Westwater is like one hundred and twenty-four or five. So you get a good sense. There's a group in the Sperone Westwater, 'Andy Warhol By Hand: Part II' of Andy’s drawings that he did while in Asia in 1956. So those are directly from his sketchbooks, and you get a sense of how he drew from life.
Also, a lot of his drawings were based on Life magazine photographs that he would crop, flop, change. That's the beginning and almost precursor of Andy’s technique of using silk screen, which is photo-based. He was doing that in the 50s and he had Ed Wallowitch take photographs for him, like setups, even into the 60s, like for the Campbell's soup can paintings and stuff. Andy started his own photography, besides Polaroids. By 1975 he started taking his own black and white, point and shoot photographs. So photography was very important, it was an element, but it wasn't the only thing he did. He started incorporating line drawing into his paintings by making his line drawings into silk screens and that starts in the early 80s when he starts to use that technique and then using acrylic paint on paper to make images, and then those would turn into a silk screen. So it's a multilayered process that he developed.
How do you think Andy Warhol's work speaks to today’s audience?
I think young people, and you can correct me, but I think there's a fascination with Andy's world, especially in the 1960s. Now you have the Whitney show that closed but is opening in may in San Francisco, then you have two shows, the one I'm doing at Sperone Westwater, and then you have 'Warhol Women' at Levy Gorvy. So if you missed the retrospective you still have the opportunity to study Andy’s work with these two exhibitions.
I'm curious about what Andy Warhol would do these days. I feel like he foresaw so many things. What is your opinion on that? What do you think?
Well, Andy was a great editor and he wasn't predictable. People always tried to pigeonhole him and say he was going to do this and do that. I would never do that because you never know. You thought maybe you knew what he was going to do and he would do something the exact opposite or people say well why didn't you do so and so’s a portrait, there's a number of reasons, besides them not paying for it but he also did portraits of people he likes which weren't commissioned. I guess Instagram he would probably be fascinated with. He did work on a computer, he did Debbie Harry’s portrait in probably 85 or 86, I can't remember the year, for the Commodore Amiga launch back then at Lincoln Center. So he worked and practiced for like two weeks with the technicians, and in those days computers were not easy to get in and out of, and so he would've been fascinated with the advent of the iPhone and what he would've done is anybody's guess. People can have hypotheticals, but I'm sure he would've been involved because he liked polaroids and audiotapes and video because you could see the video right away. Polaroids developed themselves. Audiotapes you could playback immediately. So they were tools for him to document the time he lived in. So you could imagine with the internet he would have progressed at a faster rate. What imagery and whatever he would've picked is hard to say. But he was a visionary.
He liked immediacy.
And he was a very intuitive man, and as I said was a visionary. He did see things that were going to happen in the future with reality television and the paparazzi. His famous quote, “In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” and now it's rare to find someone who won't speak to a camera and talk about their lives, almost to the point you wanna pull your hair out. He liked interesting people and he liked people who could talk and who were creative. He was very democratic in the sense of equality for everyone. You know that famous quote, “Everyone drinks the same Coke, from the President of the United States to a movie star,” I'm doing bad paraphrasing but that's the kind of sensibility he had. The Coke still tastes like a Coke if you're a bum on Bowery or you're the President of the United States or Liz Taylor, it's going to be the same Coke. There's no differentiation between them.
He’s interested in people. Is that what he primarily drew? Portraits?
As a young child, encouraged by his mother, Julia, especially when he would go through bouts of illness and he was bedridden or in the house, he studied a lot of movie star magazines and he became enamored with Hollywood; but he would do portraits of his friends in the neighborhood so that kind of carried over. There's lots of links of Andy's drawing from a very early age until his unfortunate early death at the age of fifty-eight.