Doing what it says on the tin

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.

Much the same thing has been said by many artists and writers, but seldom has this proposition been so tested as it is by ‘32 Campbell’s Soup Cans’.

In the Factory, as he called his atelier, Warhol made paintings of photographs, casually silk-screened prints of blown-up acetates of blow-ups from contact sheets of original negatives, copies of copies, images of images. He inverted high and low culture. He expressed something, defined something, about our psychic relationship to the stuff that surrounds us, in the way that Freud or Proust did. He changed the way we see, and he changed art.

And despite its spectacular inscrutability, in his early and best work there is ample evidence of personality: the sweet and funny side, in the ‘Marilyns’ and ‘Elvises’, and the cool and cruel side, in ‘Electric Chair’ and ‘Burning Car’. This evidence is retrospectively amplified because — like Wilde — Warhol gave his genius to his life, and for him his art was simply another advertisement for his non-existent self. He was the product.

In Andy Warhol: His Controversial Life, Art and Colourful Times, Tony Scherman and David Dalton (both are associated with Rolling Stone, and the latter worked for Warhol) concentrate on the best years, from 1961 to 1968, but also give a full account of his early life.

He said he ‘came from nowhere’, which was true in a way, but the Warholas — he dropped the ‘a’ as early as 1948, when he was 20 — were actually Rusyns, from Miková in Slovakia, compared by the authors to Borat’s village.