THE DAILY PIC: It didn’t take that much to unearth the new Warhol that I’m revealing today. To find the picture, which turns out to be the second work that Warhol ever published, all I had to do was take a ten-hour train ride
from New York to Pittsburgh, head to the archives of Carnegie Mellon University,
where Warhol studied art, discover that they have files dedicated to
ancient student publications, get the archivist, Julia Corrin, to pull
the box with the student magazine called Cano, leaf through
every page of every issue of the thing and then, hey presto, on the
second page of the last number published, in April of 1949, spot a
full-page illustration that could only be by the master. Or rather, the
not-quite-master-yet. (Click on my image to see the work in detail.)
Warhol
would have been all of 20 when he drew the picture, in his senior year
in college but still finding his footing as an artist. He was talented
enough to have been named art director of Cano, the students’
literary magazine. (Given what it’s like to work on student
publications, this might have been more burden than honor.) But he was
also enough of a beginner to produce a work that doesn’t quite know
where it’s going.
Warhol executed the illustration in his new
“blotted line” technique, which went on to be his signature commercial
style for the next decade and more. (The technique is on view everywhere
in the amazing catalogue of the “complete” magazine work just released
by an obsessive Warholian named Paul Maréchal; I feel guilty
having to revise its completeness already.) Warhol had adopted the
blotted line, or maybe invented it, sometime in 1948, and its presence
in this illustration pretty much guarantees that the image is by him.
He’d already used it five months before for the comic orchestra on the cover of issue 7 of Cano,
which is well known as his very first published image. (Cano also
includes some minor decorative touches that could be by Warhol.)
To
make pieces like the one I’ve discovered, Warhol first drew his subject
in fine pencil or pen, went over that drawing in goopy wet ink, then
laboriously blotted this inked line onto another sheet of paper that
would become the finished, more fractured image. All the fussy hand
labor of drawing and blotting had the paradoxical effect of producing an
image that looked mechanical, as though it were a twentieth-generation
print pulled from a lousy press, with an image that had broken down in
the pulling. Our blotted-line drawing for Cano shows Warhol
faking mass production from the very start of his career, as of course
he goes on to do, with a vengeance, through his heyday as a Pop artist.
Warhol’s so-called Factory was always much closer to a buzzing Old
Master workshop than to a real manufacturing facility. Pretending his
production was industrial was an artistic conceit.
In the new
Carnegie Mellon illustration, Warhol, not yet sure of himself, mixes his
blotted line with a second drawing style that he was also developing
around this time: a smooth, swooping pen line,
borrowed from Matisse, that evokes a spontaneous virtuosity which is in
fact at odds with the pseudo-printed labor of his other, blotted mode.
In the 1950s, Warhol mostly keeps his two styles apart, but here he
hasn’t figured that out. We have to ignore the breaks and blots in its
line to realize that our Cano piece links up nicely with plenty
of Warhol’s later, “Matissean” portraits whose faces have the same
pursed lips, fine chins and slender eyes and cheekbones as the two
figures from 1949.
Time now to deal with those absurd “leopard spots” that spread right across the Cano faces and into the spaces around them. Although those spots certainly look
like they show Warhol at his most goofily immature–had his famous acne
spread from his own face to his subjects’?– they may actually hint at
the deep-thinking artist he went on to be. Warhol’s illustration was
made to go with a terribly grim short story, written by a fellow student
named Jane E. Harris, that tells the tale of a gorgeous young Austrian
couple separated by the horrors of World War II. (Hence the German
caption to Warhol’s image, quoting from an obscure Romantic-era poem;
like Cano itself, whose Latin title–“I Sing”–comes from the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid,
Harris’s story can be a touch pretentious.) When the story’s pair meet
again after years of deprivation, their sorrows have eaten away at their
beauty; the husband, disgusted by their newfound ugliness, takes off
into the night. Warhol’s challenge was to use a single image to depict
both the couple’s former grace and their fall from it. To his credit, he
forgoes the obvious before-and-after solution in favor of what is
basically a conceptual one: The blotches that cover his whole image
refer to the idea of ugliness without stooping to a literal, narrative
depiction of it in his figures. It’s as though not just those characters
but Warhol’s entire vision has been infected by the ugly, with the
story’s illustration “catching” the repulsiveness described in its
text. This device of an all-over pattern that overlaps a figure survives
into some other Warhol pieces from the 1950s, but almost always with
the opposite effect and meaning of his Cano illustration: The
“pustules” from Cano become butterflies and flowers that flutter all
over some splendid beauty, as detachable symbols of loveliness. (See the
late ‘50s image below.) We don’t really get the return of the mournful Cano effect until around 1962, when Warhol’s photographic images of car crashes and suicides
start to disappear behind a mess of badly pulled silkscreen ink. We may
need to think of our newfound student illustration as the first of
Warhol’s Death and Disaster pictures.
Or maybe it looks even
further forward than that, to his gender-bending work of the late 1960s
and ’70s. Although the text of the Cano story describes a manly
man and elegant woman, Warhol’s illustration almost eliminates the
distinction. The picture gets made at just the moment when Warhol would
have been coming out, in a city dedicated to persecuting gay people.
(I’ll be giving the grim details in the Warhol biography I’m working
on.) The courage that the art student showed in messing with gender
becomes a driving force behind the mature artist’s work of the ‘50s and
beyond. (Cano image courtesy Carnegie Mellon University Archives)