Andy Warhol, the Public Star and the Private Self
CECILE WHITING
A painting of a person's face may have nothing to do
with the sitter's personality: Andy Warhol portrayed
Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in the early
1960s strictly in their role as public icons. In con-
trast, the popular press, from which Warhol pro-
cured the photographs for his silkscreens, never
relinquished its claim on these women's private
selves, even while it maintained their public iden-
tities as movie stars. Popular periodicals, movie
magazines and tabloids still publish photographs
and articles portraying the scandalous romances
and extravagant lifestyles of stars in the hope of
uncovering the private self that propels the public
star. Warhol denied the existence of a private self
lurking behind the facade of the public celebrity and
he took effacement of the private even further by
severing the connection between painted image and
private artist as that relationship exists in both high-
art portraiture and in Abstract Expressionism. The
negation of the private individual self in both
Warhol's portraits and his own public persona in the
early 1960s had far-reaching political implications
because it subverted the principles cherished in the
1950s by anti-communist liberal intellectuals and
the artists to which the critics among these intellec-
tuals lent their support.
Warhol based his paintings not on Monroe and
Taylor's private lives but upon their public images as
stars in the movies and mass media. In his painting
Marilyn Monroe (Fig. 1), Monroe appears in the guise
of a Sex Goddess with her famous sculpted hair,
heavy eye shadow, and full lips. Even though
Warhol painted Monroe in the early 1960s after her
death, he selected as his model publicity stills of her
from the early and mid 1950s when she reached the
height of her career in the role of the Blonde Bomb-
shell. Likewise, Warhol depicted Taylor either as she
appeared in movies of the late 1950s in works such as
Liz (Fig. 2), with her teased jet black hair and sultry
smile, or in her most renowned role as Cleopatra,
Queen of the Nile in Liz as Cleopatra. Warhol made
no effort to obscure the fact that the sources for his
paintings of Monroe and Taylor lay in some of the
most widely known photographic images of these
women published in popular magazines such as
Life, images which established their fame and iden-
tities as stars. One of the reasons that we imme-
diately recognise the women in Warhol's paintings
without having to read their titles is that the mass
media have so successfully typecast their appearance
as stars that their 'brand name' is a public self, an
immediately identifiable face and figure. Warhol
58
emphasised the 'brand-face' of his stars by mini-
mising detail, emphasising outline, and exaggerat-
ing expression. In Marilyn Monroe, for example, he
focused on the surface features by which we recog-
nise the blonde star hair, lips, eyeshadow even
to the verge of caricature: Monroe's hair becomes a
straw-yellow cap, sharply outlined and stiffly
sculpted, resting firmly upon her forehead. In a
similar spirit, in Liz, Taylor's red lipstick extends
prominently beyond the outline of her lips, and her
blue-green eyeshadow takes the form of two cut-out
shapes haphazardly pasted across her eyelids and
eyebrows. In both portraits Warhol insisted upon
the exterior physical signs by which their subjects
are recognised.
Warhol signalled his reliance on mass media
imagery in a second way by emphasising the formal
aspects of mass media photography the black/
white contrasts, garish colour, graininess which
act as the transmitters of the public star image. The
grainy shadows on Monroe's cheek and neck and
the way in which broad streaks of white show
through Taylor's hair emulate the low resolution of
newspaper photographs. Warhol clearly imitated
the way the popular press presents movie stars, but
he exaggerated the appearance and style of both the
subjects themselves and the mass-produced photo-
graphic images by which they are known. Warhol's
paintings are not, therefore, about Taylor and
Monroe as real people at all, but about their public
image in its purest form.
Despite the fact that Warhol's paintings of
Monroe and Taylor rely on mass-produced photo-
graphs, the rhetoric of his paintings differs radically
from that of the popular press. Warhol's paintings
are at odds with the popular mythology according to
which a star's 'true' identity lies trapped within a
public image. The existence of the public image in
the mass media rests upon the foundation of this
supposed private life, a private life which legitimises
the reality of the public image. The popular press of
the 1950s and early 1960s ventured to unmask the
private individuals who lay behind the public
personae of Monroe and Taylor by publishing inter-
views, articles and, aided by the perfection and avail-
ability of telephoto lenses after the Second World
Fig. 7. Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe, silkscreen
and oil on canvas, 84 X 46 ins., 1962. Rene de
Montaigue collection, Paris, courtesy of the Leo
Castelli Gallery.
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
Fig. 2. Andy Warhol. Liz, silkscreen and oil on
canvas, 40 X 40 ins., 1963.Galleria Sperone, Turin,
courtesy of the Leo Castelli Gallery.
War, photographs of stolen moments from their
private lives. During Monroe's life, the press, driven
by the question 'What is Monroe really like?',
exposed her fickle nature, her insecurities, her
marriages and her mental breakdown in 1961.' Up
to the week before her suicide the photographs
which accompanied most articles tended to capture
the kittenish, private Monroe. In a set of photo-
graphs by Alan Grant (Fig. 3) illustrating an inter-
view with her entitled 'Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down
About Being Famous', she appears smiling and
playful. Stacked like a series of snapshots taken in a
coin-operated photo booth, the photographs show
her in a variety of poses: in one her head is turned, in
another she has her finger in her mouth, in another
she growls and grimaces. The photographs, because
they appear to catch her in spontaneous and natural
poses, are meant to give us the sense that we are
glimpsing the private, fun-loving Monroe, just as the
interviewer, serving as an alter ego for the reader,
promises to bridge the unbridgeable distance
between the private Monroe and the public reader-
ship.
Likewise Taylor provided a constant dose of
 private scandal for the popular press based upon her
diamond necklaces, her million dollar contract for
the movie Cle@atra, her affair with co-star Richard
Burton at the Cleopatra set, her five marriages, and
her near death in 1961.' Alongside articles about
Taylor's tumultuous career and love life appeared

-
photographs of her, usually arm in arm with one of
her paramours, snapped on and off the movie set
and at all times of the day and night. As Vogue
magazine wrote in 1962 during the production of
Cleopatra : 'The papers are full of Liz; and the Queen
of the Nile coiffure can be felt at least as far north as
Parky3 The combined photographs and texts
t
published in popular newspapers and magazines
flaunted Taylor's and Monroe's capricious person-
-
alities, adulteries, marriages, and divorces, trans-
forming the private lives of these female stars into
public spectacle.
The mystique of the public persona depends,
however, on the supposition that a star's private life
always remains at least partially unrevealed by the
publicity pages. While each revelation converts a
piece of private life into public commodity, it also
increases the drive for more information. Each new
sensational photograph or item of startling gossip
only pushes back the ever-receding horizon of the
unrevealed private life. Here the press engages in an
undertaking whose ongoing success depends on the
ultimate futility of its goal. The very fact that there is
always something left unrevealed and beyond the
" - 1 - -- 7 public's grasp gives the press reason to continue
trying to uncover the star's private self and the public
reason to continue to buy its wares. The photo-
graphs of Monroe in the famous nude swimming
scene shot for the movie Something's Got to Give
(Fig. 4) published in the June 1962 issue of Life, a
magazine meant for a broad, family-oriented
audience, function as a thinly disguised metaphor
for the effort to uncover the true private M ~ n r o e . ~
Yet precisely at this point where she is most
'revealed', the failure of the public press to unmask
the private self becomes all too evident. The image of
the semi-naked woman standing by the pool pulling
on her robe, half turned towards the viewer, with
tousled hair and tongue between lips, automatically
falls into the public category of the consumable
nude, well-rehearsed by centuries of painting and
pornography; Monroe in the nude embodies not the
private self but instead the woman posed and objec-
tified by the male ga2e.j And, as in pornography, the
exposed Monroe can not satiate male desire since
the moment of nearly complete physical revelation
only highlights the fact that the male viewer can not
actually consummate the relationship in reality. The
dynamic of the popular press operates like a strip
tease, promising access to the private self but never
delivering it.
& Monroe and Taylor were - perhaps unwittingly

Fig. 3. Alan Grant. Marilyn Monroe, 196 2.


Fig. 4. Lawrence Schiller. Marilyn Monroe, 1962.
- complicitous in the publidprivate dichotomy
established in the popular press in that they them-
selves publicly insisted on the existence of a still
unrevealed private life. Taylor, by speaking of her
star status as if it were a dress she could put on or
take off, hinted that her essential identity lay some-
where else, hidden from public view. In a Life
magazine interview entitled 'I Refuse To Cure My
Public Image', she commented:
The Elizabeth Taylor who's famous, the one on film,
really has no depth or meaning to me. She's a totally
superficial working thing, a commodity. I really don't
know that the ingredients of the image are exactly -just
that it makes money."
Moreover, both women voiced a desire to guard
their private selves. Taylor declared in the same
interview:
Whether I have been fickle or not fickle. . . is none of the
public's business. In living my private life, my responsi-
bility is to the people who are directly involved with me
. . . I have such an ingrained sense of privacy. There's a
point past which I cannot go just for the public's benefit.'
In Monroe's case privacy became a conscious way
of maintaining an aura of mystery and fantasy. She
refused Life any pictures of her new home saying, 'I
don't want evetybody to see exactly where I live, what
my sofa or fireplace looks like . . . I want to stay just
in the fantasy of Everyman'.' Once again, the
popular press converted Monroe's unrevealed
private self into the stuff of unfulfilled sexual desire.
Yet Monroe's greatest contribution to the mass
media's public/private dynamic was not in inter-
views but through her suicide in 1962 because this
single act generated the ultimate exercise in the
exploitation of private identity to legitimize public
myth by the press. Monroe's personal tragedy raised
both the mystique of an uncovered private life and
the public act of revelation to new extremes.
Although, on the one hand, Monroe's suicide
asserted her ultimate control over her private life, on
the other, it issued a challenge to the popular press
to discover the reasons for her act and present them
to its public audience. The press cast Monroe in the
role of a tragic victim, a woman whom no one had
really understood and whose Hollywood image had
driven her to death.9 Newsweek, for instance,
suggested:
That she withstood the incredible, unknowable pressures
of her public legend as long as she did is evidence of the
stamina of the human spirit. Too late one can only wish
that somehow, somewhere that pressure might have been
lifted long enough to let her find the key to the self behind
the public image."
These articles suggested it was the pressure of the
Monroe legend which had caused her to drink, take
drugs, and finally to kill herself. Recognition of the
Monroe image as a separate entity created by Holly-
wood, an image which had victimized the 'real'
Monroe, implied the existence of a far more complex
private Monroe than any previously shown to the
public. The press thus had to redouble its quest to
reveal Monroe's private desires and personality, this
time in order to discover those aspects that had been
crushed by the movie star legend. Splashy new
stories revealed Monroe's personal frustrations with
her movie career; they blamed Hollywood for
having typecast Monroe as a breathy, vacant sex
symbol in B-grade movies despite the fact that she
had wanted more serious acting roles. Photographs
of Monroe published after her suicide portrayed a
wide range of private emotions and were meant to
 demonstrate that her personality was more complex
than her public image as the sexy blonde, or even
her temperamental-yet-playful pre-suicide private
image, might have suggested. In photographs taken
by Bert Stern immediately before her suicide, but
published in Vogue magazine after her death, she
appears wistful, helpless and forlorn. The popular
press succeeded in developing a far more compli-
cated vision of a private Monroe after her suicide, a
Monroe who, while often silly and loving, was also
fraught with anxieties.
This image has continued until the present day
and is perhaps best exemplified by Norman Mailer's
book on Monroe published in 1973. Mailer includes
a myriad of public and private photographs meant to
function as a mosaic of her life, career and the
different facets of her shifting personality.11 In the
chapter of his book entitled 'The Lonely Lady',
which recounts her approaching suicide, the
number of photographs of Monroe looking sad and
helpless increases dramatically. Nevertheless, this
new post-suicide image is in no way closer to the
'real' Monroe than the pre-suicide one; rather it is a
more extreme example of the press digging deeper
into the star's private life and dredging forth new
material to convert into an even more spectacular
public image.
Artists working in the high-art medium of oil on
canvas could and did adopt the popular press
dynamic of the private self legitimising the public
star as their own. And, in fact, it is precisely with the
ultimate exercise of the popular press machine
the Monroe tragedy that high art paintings
seemed most at home. A number of paintings of
Monroe completed after her death developed a
vision similar to that of the press the tortured
Monroe trapped within the smiling public facade.
James Gill's painting Marilyn (Fig. 5) shows a full
colour view of Monroe seated before three black and
white framed images of herself. Seen by itself against
a blank backdrop, the foreground image in a red
dress might seem to constitute a rendition of the
public Monroe. But juxtaposed against the three
pictures in the background, which resemble
publicity photographs, the figure in red becomes the
'real' Monroe behind or in this case, in front of
the popular image. All three images in the back-
ground show her multi-faceted public allure: her
hairstyle, the angle of her head, and the twist of her
body differs in each one. And all three demonstrate a
public expression of pleasure; she is all smiles.
Initially the smile of the Monroe who sits dressed in
red in the foreground appears to repeat the expres-
sion on the central image in the background. On
closer examination, however, the foreground
Marilyn stretches open her mouth, which also looks
darkened by a deep shadow cast diagonally across it,
much wider than the background image; read in
contrast to the smiling Monroe in the background
the expression on the face of the foreground Monroe
transforms itself into a grimace of seeming inner
T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
anguish. Yet since Gill's image can not actually get
closer to the real Monroe than the other products of
the popular press, his supposed juxtaposition of
public/private ends up as no more than yet another
echo of the suicide vision of Monroe manufactured
by the portrait pictorials in the media.
In a similar spirit, Derek Marlowe's painting A
Slight Misfit (Fig. 6) portrays the destructive effect of
the publicity world on the private Monroe. In
Marlowe's canvas elements of Monroe's public
image, most notably her smiling face, mingled with
hints of her private tragedy suggested by the split
that cleaves apart the two halves of her face. The
scraps of newsprint filling this facial fissure point to
the villain responsible for Monroe's destruction. In
other sections of the canvas several words printed in
bold black newsprint stand out and constitute a sort
of eulogy. They read: '[Fajrewell5, '[I]t was Fun
while it Lasted', 'Love', and 'Savage World'. All of
the words (except perhaps 'Love') must of necessity
be addressed to the private Monroe since they speak
of something which has passed and the public
Monroe did not die with her mortal body; she is in
fact still very much with us to this day. Marlowe's
painting, like Gill's, posits the presence of a private
tragic figure behind the smiling public image.
Not only did high-art painters parrot the rhetoric
of the popular press, the mass media adopted such
images for their own purposes. Life magazine repro-
duced both Gill's and Marlowe's paintings as moral-
ising works which dealt with the publicity world of
stardom that enveloped and eventually doomed the
private Monroe.12 The popular press had little
difficulty recognising in these paintings the textual
and photographic strategies which it itself practised;
these were artists who spoke the media's own
language.
Are there any traces of the private self in Andy
Warhol's portraits of Monroe and Taylor? The
timing would certainly have been right for Warhol to
turn towards the private since he painted these two
stars just at the moment when the press was examin-
ing their private lives with the greatest scrutiny. He
was certainly not oblivious to the popular press.
Walter Hopps, recalling a visit to the artist in 1961,
commented:
What really made an impression was that the floor I
may exaggerate a little was not a foot deep, but
certainly covered wall to wall with every sort of pulp
movie magazine, fan magazine, and trade sheet, having to
do with popular stars from the movies or rock 'n' roll.
Warhol wallowed in it.13
Moreover, he began to depict Monroe immediately
after her suicide. Similarly, his series of paintings
devoted to Taylor, which began in 1961 shortly after
her near brush with death, continued throughout
the scandal unleashed by the movie Cleopatra. But
Warhol avoided the sensationalism of their private
lives. His portraits of Monroe and Taylor are images
of movie actresses.
63
Fig. 5. James Gill. Marilyn, 1963.

Fig. 6. Derek Marlowe. A Slight M @ t , 1963.

THEOXFORD
ARTJOCRYAL - 102 1987
 Warhol did more than simply avoid the private
self; he actively transformed the mass media's inter-
play between the public and the private into a purely
aesthetic phenomenon. He disembodied mass-
produced photographs of his stars from their textual
source whether newspapers or publicity stills
and silkscreened them as either single or multiple
images painted with bright metallic colours. The
differences between Warhol's many single-image
Monroe canvases lie in the various colours or the
graininess of the paintings, not in the various
emotional states of the sitter. Our impulse may be to
read the variations in these images as representative
of different moods.14 But in Warhol's canvases there
is no correlation between changes in colour or
shadows and the feeling or emotions of his model. In
each image Monroe's face is essentially the same; it
lacks any significant change in facial expression or in
the positioning of the head. Warhol has simply
applied different colours to the same basic face.
Moreover, he has selected psychedaelic and metallic
colours which, in their newness and artificiality,
resist attachment to human emotions. If anything,
the namesake colours in Warhol's Gold Monroe and
Silver Monroe paintings refer more to the monetary
value of the public image than to the mood of the
private sitter.
A composite image of Monroe, such as Marilyn
Monroe, might seem more likely to come into line
with the mass media's public/private dynamic, since
it promises an emulation of the popular press's
strategy of presenting serial images of the star in
order to gain insight into the multiple moods of the
individual subject (c.f. Fig. 3). We have already seen,
for example, how an artist such as Gill adopts the
strategy of differentiation within repetition to imply
a contrast between the public and private self. But
the images in Warhol's composite paintings lack any
such distinctions. Warhol differentiated his multiple
stacked Monroe images with nothing more than the
aesthetic characteristics of the pictorial form. All
twenty images in Marilyn Monroe are based on the
same photograph and each is distinguished from its
neighbour only by the fact that some are blurred,
others streaked, some washed out, others darkened.
Each representation of Monroe is simply an aesthetic
contrivance, for all appearances the mere result of a
sloppy application of his silkscreen technique.
Variation in Warhol's pictures thus occurs only in
the public realm of visual aesthetics. He pointed out
the pure image value of the public self by submitting
the photograph of the public star to aesthetic play.
To this end the use and emulation of publicity
photographs in his painting makes perfect sense:
Warhol's paintings are not showing us any real or
private Monroe or Taylor, rather they depict the
public image of these stars as given by the popular
press and make us conscious of them as images or
symbols through the manipulation of colour and
shadow. Warhol sliced off the private side of the
dichotomy between the public and private self and
66
denied the very possibility of discussing the private.
Whereas pictorials in the media transformed the
private into public spectacle. Andy Warhol dis-
played the public symbol as straightforward aesthetic
spectacle. He did not reveal the private, he elided it.
This same device of effacing the private and pre-
senting the public operates in other Warhol paint-
ings from the same period. The paintings which
come closest to those of Taylor and Monroe, of
course, are his images of male stars like Elvis Presley
and Marlon Brando. Here the same rhetoric applies
except that these paintings lack the added punch of
evoking the woman-as-sex-commodity tradition
from popular culture. None the less these men come
as close as male subjects can to the Taylor and
Monroe model because both Elvis and Brando were
famous in the 1950s as sex symbols, that hybrid
category which casts the male body into a tradition-
ally female role. In the case of his paintings of food
products Campbell Soup, Heinz Tomato
Ketchup, Coca Cola Warhol treated not the
dynamic of public and private within the popular
press but that of image and product in American
advertising. Advertising rhetoric is virtually identical
to that of the mass media because a real product is
assumed to stand behind each advertisement image,
and it is that product which is meant to legitimize
the product's public image. In Warhol's pictures,
however, the presentation is the product; there is
nothing behind the label. Warhol's aesthetic varia-
tions thus tend to efface the relationship of advertis-
ing image to actual product, much as it eliminated
the private self behind the public star.
Warhol's series of paintings of Jackie Kennedy
painted after the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
would seem to be a blatant exception to his usual
operation of effacement. These canvases appear to
catch her at a moment of private grief mourning the
loss of her husband in the prime of his life and seem
to penetrate to the real woman behind the public
role of the First Lady. But in fact Warhol's elimina-
tion of the private took its most extreme form when
he adopted this subject since the funeral of the
President was the premier instance of the public
presentation of private emotion in Warhol's lifetime.
Both the printed media and television converted the
funeral and the family's private grief into a spectoral
public ceremony.13 Jackie Kennedy herself laid the
ground for this press extravaganza by personally
helping to plan the details of the funeral which she
modelled on Abraham Lincoln's: the press amply
publicized her central role in doing this, characteris-
ing her as being as courageous and as dignified as
the tragic Mary Todd Lincoln. The parallel between
the Kennedys and the Lincolns shows the extent to
which the funeral and Jackie Kennedy's public
display of grief followed an established protocol.16
The nation witnessed the pageantry and emotions of
the funeral on live television and relived the event
through the print media which published photo-
graphs of the ceremony in chronological sequence.
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
The December 6, 1963 issue of Life magazine, for
instance, presented a narrative about the funeral
entitled 'President Kennedy is Laid to Rest' in the
form of full-page black-and-white and colour photo-
graphs, each accompanied by explanatory texts. The
annotated photographs allowed the reader to follow
the procession from the Capitol rotunda where
Kennedy lay in rest, down the Capitol steps and
through the streets of Washington to Arlington
cemetary. Here seriality in the public press recounts
not so much the variations of private mood as a
narration of Jackie Kennedy's personal odyssey
through the funeral. Both photographs and texts
display the funeral procession and the family
mourning for all to see; for example, the words
below one photograph of the funeral read:
A woman knelt and gently kissed the flag. A little girl's
hand tenderly fumbled under the flag to reach closer.
Thus, in a privacy open to all the world, John F.
Kennedy's wife and daughter touched at a barrier that no
mortal ever can pass again . . . Through all this mournful
splendor Jacqueline Kennedy marched enfolded in
courage and a regal dignity.17
The media served as a conduit between Jackie
Kennedy and the nation; with the aid of the media
the nation collectively mourned Kennedy's death
through her private grief. Her private grief became
public ritual; her sorrow was not hers, it belonged to
the nation.
Warhol's aesthetic manipulations of these images
make clear that he is dealing with this nationally
known public image, not the private Jackie
Kennedy. In his paintings he used eight widely
diffused newspaper photographs of Jackie Kennedy,
most of them reproduced in Life, from both imme-
diately before and at various times after the assassi-
nation. And once again Warhol subjected these
images to purely aesthetic variations. In The Week
That Was I (Fig. 7), which contains all eight images
Warhol used for the Jackie Kennedy series, the
photographs are not presented in chronological or
narrative order. The photographs in the top left
quadrant show Jackie Kennedy in the limousine in
Dallas moments before the assassination; the images
in the bottom right quadrant, which depict her at
Lyndon B.Johnson's swearing-in, are the next set of
pictures in actual narrative time; the photographs in
the upper right and lower left quadrants all come
from the funeral ceremony but are hopelessly out of
chronological order. Warhol pairs each of the eight
photographs with its mirrored reversal; this tactic
not only guarantees that half the images must
necessarily be inaccurate as documentary photo-
graphs, it also creates playful visual impressions for
purely aesthetic effect. In the upper left quadrant the
mirroring goes so far as to evoke a visual joke at the
expense of John F. Kennedy; one side of his face
matches the same side of his face reversed in order to
constitute one distorted frontal view of his head. All
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
eight reversals form striking geometric patterns.
While in the top left and bottom right quadrants the
pairs of heads face towards and away from each
other alternatively, in the top right and bottom left
horizontally neighbouring images line up like
soldiers pointing in the same direction, first left then
right or vice versa. The Week That Was I treats the
image of Jackie Kennedy's face not as a record of
private grief but as a public icon, already produced
by the popular press and subject to Warhol's
aesthetic manipulations. Indeed such aesthetic play
cuts off any reference back to the private self; the
actual Jackie Kennedy, like the real Monroe and
Taylor, is strikingly absent in Warhol's pictorial
essays.
Warhol undid the public/private dynamic of the
popular press's presentation of famous women,
distancing himself from its rhetorical norm. This
was not the only visual language available at the
time, however, and given that Warhol's paintings
portray famous people with oil paint on canvas
another visual heritage suggests itself immediately:
high-art portraiture. At first this avenue does not
promise much since the primary function of portrai-
ture is remarkably similar to the mass media's
public/private dynamic: although high-art portrai-
ture does not use the practice of serial repetition, it
does try to find an expression, pose, or painting style
which gives us insight into the real person behind
the picture. Modern twentieth-century portraiture
in particular (when being modern is often equated
with an examination of interior experience), strives
to reveal the sitter's deeper psychological self. Since
Warhol's paintings of Monroe, Taylor, and Jackie
Kennedy resist all connection to a private reality,
they have no meaning as portraits of individuals.
That we hesitate to call Warhol's paintings of these
women 'portraits' reveals their inherent incompati-
bility with the rhetoric of high-art portraiture. His
works would therefore appear not to fit into its
primary dynamic any better than they do into that of
the popular press pictorials.
Yet a second dynamic exists within modern high
art portraiture: technique and aesthetic manipula-
tions refer to the private artist as much as, if not more
than, the private sitter. In Francis Bacon's Portrait of
Isabel Rawsthorne (Fig. 8), for example, the grossly
twisted and disfigured face of the sitter, the sweeping
gestural brushstrokes, and the lurid, predominantly
brown, colours seem less to concern the tortured
private self of the sitter than the private angst of the
painter himself. Such a connection between style and
artist, of course, is not limited just to modern portrai-
ture, but is rather a characteristic of modern painting
in general, and indeed Bacon adopted much of his
stylistic angst from an art movement which was
custom designed to minimise reference to the subject
and to maximise reference to the artist: Abstract
Expressionism. Although its critical supporters
espoused an 'art for art's sake' position in the 1950s
by claiming that the signs of Abstract-Expressionist
67
Fig. 7. Andy Warhol. The Week that Was I , silk-
screen on canvas. 80 X 65 ins., 1963. Raymond
Goetz collection, Chicago, courtesy of the Leo
Castelli Gallery.
Fig. 8. Francis Bacon. Portrait of Isabella Raws-
thome, oil on canvas, 32 X 27 ins., 1966. Tate
Gallery, London.
 paintings lacked any external reference, they did
insist that such works referred to the individual
private artist. Pure aesthetic manipulation in
Abstract Expressionism revealed the artist's indi-
viduality and interior emotion in its heroic propo-
rtions, the gestural brushstrokes of a Jackson
Pollock or Wilhem de Kooning, the argument ran,
conveyed the spontaneous expression of the artists'
personal confrontation with the blank canvas. As
we have seen Warhol's manipulations discount any
reference to external subject for the sake of pure
aesthetics: do his paintings thus belong to the
Abstract-Expressionist heritage of style revealing
the individual artist?
The answer is, once again, no: Warhol completely
breaks the link between painting and private artist.
Moreover, the private artist, like the private sitter, no
longer exists in his world. His aesthetic manipula-
tions specifically avoid the language of Abstract
Expressionism and stress instead the impersonality
of the artist. The silkscreen itself is a technical
medium which Warhol called an 'assembly-line'
technique 18 which is the opposite of the direct
physical and personal encounter between artist and
canvas which occurred in action painting. Warhol's
paintings do not even need to be reproduced by the
individual artist but can be and were mass-
produced in the 'Factory'; Warhol's chosen name
for his studio itself suggests impersonal production.
As he once commented to G. R. Swenson: 'I think it
would be so great if more people took up silk screens
so that no one would know whether my picture was
mine or somebody else's.'19 His technique self-
consciously eschewed the personal and individualis-
tic. He eliminated the flourish of the gestural
brushstroke which in Abstract Expressionism serves
as a signifier of the artist's presence, personal vision,
or individual angst; all that remain are mechanical
silkscreen stains. Warhol seemed aware retro-
spectively, at the very least of the implications of
his technique when he said in 1980: 'I still wasn't
sure if you could completely remove all the hand
gesture from art and become noncommittal, anony-
mous. I knew that I definitely wanted to take away
the commentary of the gestures.'20 His working
process and technique subverted the Abstract
Expressionist fiction that the brushstroke on the
canvas represents the pre-aestheticised and direct
emotions of the artist. Whereas Abstract Expression-
ists proposed a direct correlation between surface
gesture and the genuine and spontaneous expres-
sion of personal emotion, Warhol argued that
private unmediated emotion never appeared in his
paintings.
But Warhol did not just avoid the presentation of
Abstract-Expressionist personality within the canvas
itself: in his day-to-day life he challenged the entire
myth of the Abstract-Expressionist artistic persona.
Resolutely rejecting the Abstract-Expressionist
myth of the artist as the profoundly tortured and
solitary individual, he was a public star without a
70
private or unique identity in the 1960s. His inter-
action with the press functioned to deny the indi-
viduality of his self. In the rare cases when he
employed the formulation 'I think' in his statements
to reporters a construction which by its very
nature would suggest an independent ego he
used it to advocate the elimination of the T or the
individual self: 'I think everyone should be like
everyone else.'21 In order to insist on the absence of
individuality in his public persona he denied any
sort of personal point of view: he tended either to
react to every question in the same way or to respond
with his infamous monosyllabic answers of 'yes' or
'no' as if nothing could possibly stir a private
emotional response, an individual outburst of indig-
nation or approval.22 His public statements of the
early 1960s lack any sort of personal stance on
current issues, much less a commitment or even a
judgement. Warhol effaced his own ego, instructing
that 'The interviewer should just tell me the words
he wants me to say and I'll repeat them after him.
I'm so empty I can't think of anything to say.'23
He claimed that there was neither an individual
nor private Andy Warhol; he emptied his private life
into the public arena. The promotional blurb on the
back cover of the Harper paperback of Warhol's The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol tantalises the reader with:
'At last, the private Andy Warhol talks: about love,
sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success'. This
sensationalist advertisement places Warhol's Philo-
sophy within the genre of confessional autobio-
graphies written by movie stars. But Warhol's book
does no such thing. Rather, it functions as a parody
of personal revelation; it is full of chatty banalities
and frequent reassertions that he is 'nothingness'. In
the end the Warhol Philosophy reveals no more to us
than that he is a non-entity without politics, personal
life, sex, or age. While there is obviously a self operat-
ing here to promote the image of the non-self, to say
that Warhol was a .^-promoter is not a contradic-
tion in terms since self-promotion for him was
simply a means for emptying the private into the
public sphere. By exploiting the media to expose
himself to constant view, he transformed his private
life or lack of it into public spectacle. While
Warhol may have been self-emptying, the emphasis
was always on the empty and not on the self. He
thereby became doubly transparent: he offered
himself up as an empty receptacle that could be
filled with whatever others want to see in him, and as
a mirror that could reflect back to others an image of
themselves and their culture. As Warhol himself
wrote in the Philosophy: 'I'm sure I'm going to look
in the mirror and see nothing. People are always
calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a
mirror, what is there to see?'24
The claim can be made, of course, that the non-
self Warhol presents his empty, detached, or cool
persona is none the less an idiosyncratic character
or even an individualistic stance. Yet he was so effec-
tive at publicly typecasting himself both his
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
 physical appearance and his personal behaviour
that his idiosyncracies can also be understood as
being generic. Thus he could be successfully imper-
sonated on college campuses in 1967 by Alan
Midgette, a man who did not much look like Warhol
but nevertheless managed to pull off the act simply
by spraying his hair silver and imitating the painter's
monosyllabic responses to questions. It is, therefore,
not a paradox to say that Warhol was both idio-
syncratic and generic simply because it is impossible
to distinguish his private from his public self. The
private simply did not exist for him, or, alternatively,
the absence of the private constituted his public
persona.
Warhol's relationship with his entire Factory
entourage, most notably with his Factory sidekick
Edie Sedgewick, was one of his most successful
techniques for denying the existence of his own
private self. He surrounded himself with people who
were willing to strip themselves of their own indi-
vidual personalities and adopt Warhol's generic
husk. Sedgewick, a rich girl from a well-established
family, joined the Factory in 1965 and soon became
Warhol's 'pop girl of the year'.25 As Warhol's fiction
of an instant celebrity, Sedgewick represented a star
without a personal self come to life. Warhol himself
wrote of Sedgewick: '[She] could be anything you
wanted her to be a little girl, a woman, intelligent,
dumb, rich, poor anything. She was a wonderful,
beautiful blank.'26 More important, however, her
vacuousness made Sedgewick a perfect clone of
Warhol's own emptiness. Slim, rich, and pretty, she
was an otherwise empty receptacle whom Warhol,
himself totally vacuous, could manipulate as a reflec-
tion of himself, a mirror reflecting a mirror. And
Warhol and Sedgewick played on the interchange-
ability of their two non-existent selves for all it was
worth: Sedgewick dyed her hair silver to match
Warhol's and dressed in clothes like his. It was not
just that Sedgewick lacked a private self, even her
public identity was not her own: she reflected back
to Warhol the empty public self he projected onto
her. And conversely, as the alter-non-ego of Warhol,
Sedgewick highlighted the fact that Warhol's generic
image was not even attached to his single unique
body. Like so many Campbell soup labels, it could
be pasted onto any human receptacle that happened
along.
Mutual reflection between Warhol and his self-
image Sedgewick was so close as to border on love,
or at least that which comes closest to love when no
active subject or object of affection exists.28 Indeed
Sedgewick was the one person whom he allowed to
share his bed. Yet even on the single occasion when
Warhol spent the night with Sedgewick he never let
down his generic guard, for he did not sleep himself
but stayed awake all night to watch her sleep.
During that night it was her private self which
emerged, served up to Warhol's scrutiny. Warhol
recounted his 'fascinated-but-horrified' reaction as
he watched her:
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
One night, when the parties were over, I guess she didn't
want to sleep with somebody, so she asked me to share a
room with her. In her sleep her hands kept crawling: they
couldn't sleep. I couldn't keep my eyes off them. She kept
scratching with them. Perhaps she just had bad dreams
. . . I don't know, it was really sad.29
Quite unconsciously, of course, Sedgewick reversed
the process from the 1950s movie Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, that archetypal allegory of conformity, for
it was during her sleep that Sedgewick's individual-
ity emerged out of Warhol's generic mould, reclaim-
ing control over her body. And Warhol, having gone
to such efforts to eliminate the private in his own life
and that of his Pop 'superstar' follower, thought it
'sad' when Sedgewick's private tortured self rose to
the surface.
Warhol applied the device of effacing his private
self and packaging the public image with equal
efficacy in both his paintings and his life. In his
paintings he eliminated any connection between
image and private sitter, as that relationship existed
in both the popular press and in high-art modern
portraiture, and between image and the private artist
as that relationship existed in both portraiture and
Abstract Expressionism. As Warhol once pointed
out: 'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,
just look at the surface of my films and paintings and
me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.'30
The Warhol painting seems to negate all its possible
referents.
Warhol's double negation of any reference to the
subject or to the artist allows for the argument that
Warhol was actually espousing a position that was
holier than thou vis-a-vis Abstract Expressionism;
he might be seen as extending the Abstract-
Expressionist position of 'art for art's sake' by even
purifying art from the contamination of the artist's
personality. Some critics in the late 1960s did in
fact make an effort to connect Pop Art and Abstract
Expressionism, reincorporating Pop into the avant-
garde tradition by claiming that Pop artists were
not concerned in the least with the images of mass
culture per se but rather with the same formal
issues as their abstract predecessors.31 Richard
Morphet, for instance, baptised Pop Art as the
natural successor to Abstract Expressionism by
saying: 'In successive phases of American art since
the war, simplicity, directness and limitations of both
images whether abstract or figurative and
means, have been powerfully expressive in them-
selves.'32 In retrospect it is evident that Pop artists
did indeed take on certain Abstract-Expressionist
concerns. In the design of his silkscreens, Warhol,
like Jackson Pollock, incorporated the accidents of
the medium slippage, blurring, overlapping
which gave both variety to his surface and evidence of
his working process. In this sense he reclaimed visual
imagery from mass culture movie stars, soup cans,
coke bottles for the avant-garde conventions of
Abstract Expressionism, in essence suggesting that
71
the aesthetic language of high-art abstraction was
powerful enough to treat even popular imagery
without being infected by its generally accepted
powers of external reference. Even Warhol's titles
serve to incorporate mass culture into high art
practice since in the case of his paintings of Monroe
and Taylor, for instance, the title consists of the
star's name qualified by either the number of
images within the frame, the predominant colour of
the canvas, the size (big/little) of the work, or its
date (early/late), not unlike the Abstract Expres-
sionists whose works were often titled by number or
colour.
Such an argument misrepresents Warhol, how-
ever, for he never really sought to attain the hermetic
isolation of an 'art for art's sake' position; rather he
brought both the images and the rhetoric of mass
culture into play with Abstract Expressionism in
such as way as to subvert some of the most basic
assumptions of the 1950s about the relationship
between art and politics. The very presence of
images of mass culture which are subjected to formal
exercises in Warhol's works repudiates both the
Abstract Expressionists, who adopted only tragic
myth or anguished inner emotion as valid subject
matter, and their two most important critical
supporters, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosen-
berg, who resoundingly condemned mass culture as
being incompatible with even detrimental to
the concerns and welfare of the avant-garde.33
According to them, the contamination of high art by
mass culture or even commercialism would not only
lead to the deterioration of critical standards and the
quality of art, but could also have even more serious
political effects. Greenberg and Rosenberg, along
with a number of other influential American intel-
lectuals of the 1950s, associated mass culture with
mass consciousness, and felt, based on the examples
set by totalitarian states, that this was a tool of
political control.34 As a result they felt it was their
duty to point out instances of mass consciousness
and conformity in the United States which they
believed fundamentally threatened democratic indi-
vidualism. Abstract Expressionism, for Greenberg
and Rosenberg, epitomised a form of individuality
which both functioned in opposition to mass con-
sciousness and celebrated the freedom supposedly
allowed in a democratic state in which creativity
could flourish.35 It can not be accidental that many
of the images of popular culture which Warhol
adopted date from the 1950s, when the distrust of
mass culture was extremely prevalent among the
intellectuals, nor that he engaged the rhetoric of the
popular press which was considered the primary
instrument of mass indoctrination. Warhol's images
offended because he used that which was considered
not only artistically but also politically taboo.36
Warhol's artistic persona of the anti-self also
rejected another crucial component, individuality,
from the principles which were so important in the
1950s to the Abstract Expressionists and intellectuals
72
concerned with the external threat of communism
and the internal threat of conformity. Warhol went
so far as to suggest in Newsweek magazine in 1964
that everyone should become a machine, the charac-
ter trait attributed in the red-baiting era of the 1950s
to people who lived in the Eastern Bloc.37 Warhol
seemed to be celebrating a spirit of conformity which
intellectuals in the past has associated in its most
extreme case with the faceless communist auto-
maton and in its less extreme form with the comfort-
able suburban middle-class citizen. Warhol stated:
I want everybody to think alike . . . Russia is doing it
under government. It's happening here all by itself
without being under strict government; so if its working
without trying why can't it work without being Com-
munist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're
getting more and more that way.38
This is almost exactly what intellectuals in the 1950s
might have said, yet they certainly would not have
added a positive note of approval. The repudiation
of the conformity and levelling of society which
seemed to be manifesting itself almost everywhere in
American life in the 1950s, was the very raison d'etre
of critics such as Greenberg and Rosenberg. Indi-
viduality became for them a sacrosanct value which
the artist (and art critic) were best equipped to
protect. Warhol's paintings and lifestyle thus end up
negating the hegemony of intellectual thought in the
1950s; he re-opened the dialogue between highbrow
and lowbrow art in an effort not to shock the
American middle class out of their comformity but
to epater Us intellectuels by attacking their sacred cow
of individuality.
And yet while Warhol succeeded in subverting the
assumptions of 1950s intellectuals and the then
avant-garde of Abstract Expressionism, his reversal
of prevailing ideas was a very traditional strategy to
claim avant-garde status. Warhol's commissioned
portraits of the 1970s, wholesale in number, reveal
the extent to which his adoption of the process of
subversion in the 1960s guaranteed his avant-garde
status and consequently provided him with a lucra-
tive sales in the 1970s. The 1960s paintings served to
define a style recognisable as Warhol's own; the
1970s works modify his artistic position in order to
sell that style for profit. As iconoclastic modernist
Warhol acted as an astute entrepreneur forming and
exploiting his own artistic market. Indeed Warhol's
practice highlights the place where high-art painting
and mass marketing find common ground in post-
war America: good business sense.
One canvas of the 1960s eliminates the usual
Warhol device of effacement in such a way as to pre-
figure the direction his art was to take in the 1970s:
this work, Ethel Scull 36 Times (Fig. 9) is a portrait of
the wife of a New York taxicab fleet owner and art
collector, Robert Scull. It depends on a wholesale
incorporation of, not a distancing from, the sources
and rhetoric of popular culture. The photographs he
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
Fig. 9. Andy Warhol. Ethel Scull 36 Times, silk-
screen on canvas, 35 panels each 20 X 16 ins.,
1963. Mr. and Mrs. Scull, New York, courtesy of
the Leo Castelli Gallery.
used in the painting were taken in a coin-operated
photo booth, that popular and inexpensive machine
found in bus stations and department stores all
across America. In using these four-frame serial
images as the basis for the portrait of this relatively
unknown person, Warhol employed the multiple
image rhetoric by which the tabloids and popular
magazines presented famous stars. Ethel Scull 36
Times includes over thirty separate images each of
which is differentiated by physical pose and/or
psychological expression (the work also includes a
few reflected image repetitions but these are well-
hidden). In each of the thirty-plus images she has a
new facial expression, turn of the head, or hand
gesture which connotes a different mood. Even the
fact that although there are 35 panels, Warhol titles
his painting Ethel Scull 36 Times, suggests that his
painting functions like a portrait-pictorial in the
popular press. All 35 panels together constitute a
mosaic, a 36th portrait, of Scull. Thus he directs his
sources in popular culture to obtain the goal of both
popular portrait pictorials and high-art portraiture
that of capturing the sitter's personality.
In the 1970s Warhol began to accept commis-
sions for portraits on a regular basis. These works,
while still recognisably in his style, entail a
commodity relationship between portraitist and
client and fall entirely back into the tradition of
high-art portraiture.39 He depicts the wealthy and
well-known, including Brigitte Bardot, Yves St.
Laurent, Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, and Philip
Johnson, most often in single (not multiple) images
titled either by 'Portrait of. . .' or by the sitter's full
name. In these commissioned portraits the subjects
appear in a variety of poses frontal or from the
side, their heads turned or tossed back, smiling or
serious the standard conventions, in other words,
for suggesting real personality captured by the
portrait. In one, Portrait of Yves St. Laurent, for
instance, the designer appears dressed in a striped
blue shirt, bow-tie, and jacket, his cheek resting on
his fist, his eyes cast downwards with a serious and
contemplative expression on his face. The fact that
St. Laurent, like Warhol's other sitters from this
period, is dressed in his own clothing and seated in
a 'spontaneous' pose is meant to suggest that
Warhol has succeeded in conveying his own
personal sense of profound self, not a flattened
image of the public figure.
But it is not just the private sitter who re-emerges
in these portraits of the 1970s; Warhol, the private
artist, surfaces as well. The style here has changed,
for Warhol has reincorporated the verve of the
Abstract-Expressionist gesture in order to signal the
presence of his own artistic personality. Although
the basic images in these works were still produced
by silkscreens, Warhol superimposed bold, painterly
strokes of colour upon this visual foundation. In the
portrait of St. Laurent thick strokes of paint appear
around the sitter's head and his left shoulder.
Warhol's commissioned portraits, therefore, not
only show a more private view of the sitter, they also
index the private artist, definitively converting his
images back into the high-art portrait tradition.
The paintings of the 1960s which ride the line
between so many rhetorical forms collapse back into
the banality of conventionalised portraiture in the
1970s. Yet at the same time the commissions for the
portraits during this later period depend on
Warhol's avant-garde status and style which was
established by his early 1960s paintings. The recipe
of the 1970s is as clear as it was lucrative: to a solid
avant-garde reputation Warhol added the indi-
viduating signs of private artist and private sitter
which gave his paintings the added value of being
unique commodities.
Notes
My thanks to Anne Higonnet, Cat Nilan, Lisa Tiersten and, above all,
Jim Herbert, for their comments on this paper.
1. See, for instance, Alice T. Mclntyre, 'Making the Misfits or
Waiting for Monroe or Notes from Olympus', Esquire, 55 (March 1961),
p. 74; Richard Meryman, 'Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being
Famous', Life, 53 (3 August 1962), pp. 31-4; David Zeitlin, 'Powerful
Stars Meet to Play-Act Romance', Life, 16(15 August 1960), pp. 64-71;
'Marilyn's New Role', Time, 11 (17 February 1961), pp. 39-40.
2. An extremely serious strain of staphylococcus pneumonia almost
killed Taylor in March of 1961.
74
3. 'The New Cleopatra Complex', Vogue, 139 (15 January 1962),
p. 40.
4. 'They Fired Marilyn: Her Dip Lives On', Life, 52 (22June 1962),
pp. 87-9.
5. See Geraldine Finn, 'Patriarchy and Pleasure: The Pornographic
Eye/1', in Feminism Now: Theory and Practice, Montreal, 1985, pp. 81-95.
6. Richard Meryman, 'I Refuse to Cure my Public Image', Life, 57
(18 December 1964), p. 74.
7. Ibid., pp. 81-2.
8. Richard Meryman, 'A Long Last Talk with a Lonely Girl', Life, 53
(17 August 1962), pp. 32-3, 63-71.
9. 'I Love You . . . I Love You', Newsweek, 60 (20 August 1962),
pp. 30-1; Clare Boothe Luce, 'What Really Killed Marilyn', Life, 57
(7 August 1964), pp. 68-72.
10. 'Marilyn Monroe', Vogue, 140 (1 September 1962), p. 90.
11. Norman Mailer, Marilyn: A Biography, New York, 1973.
12. 'The Growing Cult of Marilyn', Life, 54 (25 January 1963),
pp. 89-91.
13. Jean Stein, Edie: An American Biography, New York, 1982, p. 192.
14. See, for instance, Roberta Bernstein, 'Warhol as Printmaker',
in Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne, ed. Frayda Feldman
and Jorg Schellmann, New York, 1985, pp. 15-16; David Antin,
'Warhol: The Silver Tenement', Art News, 65 (Summer 1986), pp. 47-8,
58-9.
15. Warhol himself comments: 'I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as
President; he was handsome, young, smart but it didn't bother me
that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the tele-
vision and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad.' Andy
Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol '60s, New York, 1980,
p. 60.
16. See, for instance, 'President Kennedy is Laid to Rest', Life, 55
(6 December 1963), pp. 3847; Dora Jane Hamblin, 'Mrs Kennedy's
Decisions Shaped all the Solemn Pageantry', Life, 55 (6 December
1963), pp. 48-9.
17. 'President Kennedy is Laid to Rest', p. 38.
18. Warhol, Popism, p. 22.
19. G. R. Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?', Art News, 62 (November
1963), p. 25.
20. Warhol, Popism, p. 7.
21. Jack Kroll, 'Saint Andrew', Newsweek, 64 (7 December 1964),
p. 102.
22. See 'Soup's On', Arts, 39 (May-June 1963), pp. 16-18.
23. Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol, London, 1971, p. 9.
24. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back
Again), New York, 1975, p. 7.
25. See 'Modern Living', Time, 66 (27 August 1965), pp. 65-6.
26. Warhol, The Philosophy, p. 33.
27. Stein, Edie, p. 182 and p. 250.
28. One can infer the possibility of love from the Philosophy in which
Warhol writes about Edie (she is named Taxi in the book) in a chapter
entitled 'Love(Prime)'.
29. Stein, Edie, p. 247. In the Philosophy Warhol used the adjectives
'fascinated-but-horrified' to account for his reaction when he described
this scene. Warhol, The Philosophy, p. 36.
30. Gidal, Andy Warhol, p. 9.
31. Richard Morphet, Andy Warhol, Tate Gallery, London, 1971;
Robert Rosenblum, 'Pop Art and Non-Pop Art', in Pop Art Redefined,
eds. John Russell and Suzi Gablik, London, 1969, pp. 536.
32. Morphet, Andy Warhol, p. 8.
33. See articles by Greenberg and Rosenberg from the 1930s, 40s and
50s, many of which have been collected in Clement Greenberg, Art and
Culture and Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New and The Anxious
Object. See, as well, analyses of their intellectual development by Serge
Guilbaut, How New Tork Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom and the Cold War, Chicago, 1983; Fred Orton and Griselda
Pollock, 'Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed', Art History, 4
(September 1981), pp. 305-27; James D. Herbert, The Political Origins of
Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical
Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, Stanford Honors Essay
in Humanities, Number XXVIII, Stanford, 1985.
34. See the special issue of the Partisan Review: America and the Intellec-
tuals: A Symposium, Partisan Review Series #4, 1953.
35. Eva Cockroft, 'Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
War', Artforum, 12 (June 1974), pp. 3941; Max Kozloff, 'American
Painting during the Cold War', Artforum, 11 (May 1973), pp. 43-54.
36. Both Greenberg and Rosenberg condemned Pop Art, contrasting
its superficiality to the depth, originality and staying power of Abstract
Expressionism. Eventually Rosenberg finally came to accept Warhol in
the 1970s as an artist who demonstrated that art was a commodity of the
an market. But, even at this later date, Rosenberg wrote of Warhol:'His
weakness is that he expresses no desire to change that situation and
suggests nothing capable of doing so.' See Harold Rosenberg, 'Warhol:
Art's Other Self, in Art on the Edge, London, 1976, pp. 634; Clement
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 10:2 1987
Greenberg, 'After Abstract-Expressionism', Art International, 6 (October
1962), pp. 24-32.
37. Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?', p. 25.
38. Ibid.
39. See Robert Rosenblum, 'Andy Warhol: Court Painter to the 70s' m Andy
Warhol: Portrait of the 70s ed. David Whitney, Whitney Museum of
American An, New York, 1970, pp. 18-20; David Bourdon, 'Andy
Warhol and the Society Icon', Art in America, 63 (January-February
1975), pp. 42-5.
75