GLR July-August 2024

seems, though, that this second relationship was one-sided, with Warhol showering presents and money on Gould, who was only occasionally available to spend time with Warhol. Physical de tails about Warhol’s relationships don’t seem to have been recorded. Warhol and his two partners, now dead, never spoke publicly about what went down. § E VERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW about Warhol has already been discovered, or nearly so. We can now see reproductions of his early commercial work: highly stylized pictures of shoes and other fashion accessories, rendered with pinprick pointiness and a faux-Edwardian whimsy that recalls drawings The New Yorker often published in that era. It was in that magazine that Warhol discovered Truman Capote, the only writer that he seems to have cared much about. He courted Capote (by mail) with notes and little booklets of his drawings, hoping they would capture the writer’s interest. But, no, he was brushed aside along with so many other starry-eyed wannabes. Another influence on Warhol at that time was the fanciful nostalgia on show at the uptown dessert place Serendipity 3, a favorite haunt of gay New Yorkers in the 1950s. Serendipity pioneered the revival of Tiffany lampshades and devised a jaunty, chichi ambiance well suited for the drawings that management allowed Warhol to dis play on its walls. Meanwhile, his butterflies, high heels, and winged cupids found a ready reception in fashion magazines and often won industry awards. Despite his success as a commercial graphic artist, Warhol wasn’t satisfied. Ambitious young rebels like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were just beginning to emerge around 1960, thought what he did wasn’t real art, just swish commercial stuff. The new generation had become dissatisfied with the dominant orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and its transcendental ambitions, a program cut off from contemporary America and from our brand of ironic humor. Johns’ flags and targets and Rauschenberg’s assemblages were a frontal assault on the tenets of the older movement and its methods. Since Warhol didn’t do abstraction, he must have seen these new ini tiatives as a step in his direction. In 1961, he assembled a win dow treatment for Bonwit Teller that incorporated some graphics drawn from comic strips—Popeye, Olive Oyl, and company. Soon thereafter, Roy Lichtenstein produced his first comic-strip paintings, but he claimed he hadn’t seen Warhol’s window. Maybe Pop sensibility was just filtering into the at mosphere of the day. Early in 1962, Warhol asked a friend named Muriel Latow what he should do. She replied: “Paint something you love.” He asked what that might be and was told: “Money.” So he began painting a two-dimensional grid of dollar bills, each slightly dif ferent from the last. She also said: “Paint some familiar object that’s so ordinary nobody pays attention to it.” That’s when he settled on the Campbell’s soup cans theme, a step up from his mother’s ketchup substitute. From there he went to Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo boxes. Warhol had probably seen Johns’ sculptures titled Painted Bronze . These were bronze casts, first, of a Savarin coffee can and then of Ballantine ale cans, which were shown at the beginning of the ’60s. Why not go there? Pop, bang, shazam went a new art movement, the most influ ential of the decade—so much so that elements of it are still

At the Factory: Warhol, Chuck Wein, and Sandy Kirkland. From Factory Andy Warhol Stephen Shore.

by the German Expressionist George Grosz, though its deliber ately grotesque imagery was repellent to everyone else. During those early years, Andy also fell under the spell of Hollywood and its iconic stars. One way to understand his mature work is to see it as an effort to make trashiness kind of glamorous, and glamour kind of trashy. The first category of subjects is raised up, and the second pulled down, so that everything ends up on the same plane. As for personal psychology, in his teens Andy realized that he was attracted to boys, a predisposition most people regarded as a private disaster in the years before Gay Liberation. The best available remedy was to go to the metropolis. So, after getting his degree in graphic design, Warhol set out for New York. The apprentice’s lean years soon gave way to a successful career in design, a decade of doing stylish graphics for fashion houses and dressing windows for department stores. No doubt he had, even during the repressed 1950s, brief sexual encounters and longer affairs, but little information about them has surfaced. Warhol never spoke publicly about sex, staying resolutely in the closet even as it slowly went transparent around him. He didn’t have to come out; everybody knew. When asked, he claimed to be uninterested in sex, since it brought with it emotional stresses that he didn’t care to endure. The closest he comes to forth rightness is in the Philosophy book’s chapter titled “Love (Se nility),” in which he says that sex as an adult is really a nostalgic effort to recapture the first encounters experienced in youth. In other words, sex is nostalgia for sex. The diary gives no facts about love affairs, but the TV series establishes that he did have two long-term relationships at the height of his fame—first, with an office assistant named Jed Johnson, and later with the Paramount executive Jon Gould. It

July–August 2024

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