At five o’clock one particular afternoon the doorbell rang and De came in and sat down. I poured Scotch for us, and then I went over to where two paintings I’d done, each about six feet high and three feet wide, were propped, facing the wall. I turned them around and placed them side by side against the wall and then I backed away to take a look at them myself. One of them was a Coke bottle with Abstract Expressionist hash marks halfway up the side. The second one was just a stark, outlined Coke bottle in black and white. I didn’t say a thing to De. I didn’t have to—he knew what I wanted to know.
“Well, look, Andy,” he said after staring at them for a couple of minutes. “One of these is a piece of shit, simply a little bit of everything. The other is remarkable—it’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.”
That afternoon was an important one for me.
I can’t even count the number of people after that day who when they saw my paintings burst out laughing. But De never thought Pop was a joke.
As he was leaving he looked down at my feet and said, “When the hell are you going to get yourself a new pair of shoes? You’ve been wearing those that way all over town for a year. They’re crummy and creepy—your toes are sticking out.” I enjoyed De’s honesty a lot, but I didn’t get new shoes—it’d taken me too long to break that pair in. I took his advice about most other things, though.
I used to go around to all the galleries in the late fifties, usually with a good friend of mine named Ted Carey. Ted and I both had wanted to have our portraits done by Fairfield Porter, and we’d thought that it would be cheaper if he painted us in tandem and then we could cut it apart and each take half. But when he’d posed us, he sat us so close together on the couch that we couldn’t slice a straight line between us and I’d had to buy Ted out. Anyway, Ted and I followed the art scene together, keeping up with what was going on.
One afternoon Ted called up very excited to say he’d just seen a painting at the Leo Castelli Gallery that looked like a comic book and that I should go right over there and have a look myself because it was the same sort of thing I was doing.
I met Ted later and we walked upstairs to the gallery. Ted was buying a Jasper Johns light bulb drawing for $475, so it was easy to maneuver ourselves into the back room, and there I saw what Ted had been telling me about—a painting of a man in a rocket ship with a girl in the background. I asked the guy who was showing us the stuff, “What’s that over there?” He said it was a painting by a young artist named Roy Lichtenstein. I asked him what he thought of it and he said, “I think it’s absolutely provocative, don’t you?” So I told him I did paintings that were similar and asked if he’d like to come up to my studio and look at them. We made an appointment for later that afternoon. His name was Ivan Karp.
When Ivan came by, I had all my commercial art drawings stashed away out of sight. As long as he didn’t know anything about me, there was no sense bringing up my advertising background. I still had the two styles I was working in—the more lyrical painting with gestures and drips, and the hard style without the gestures. I liked to show both to people to goad them into commenting on the differences, because I still wasn’t sure if you could completely remove all the hand gesture from art and become noncommittal, anonymous. I knew that I definitely wanted to take away the commentary of the gestures—that’s why I had this routine of painting with rock and roll blasting the same song, a 45 rpm, over and over all day long—songs like the one that was playing the day Ivan came by for the first time, “I Saw Linda Yesterday” by Dickey Lee. The music blasting cleared my head out and left me working on instinct alone. In fact, it wasn’t only rock and roll that I used that way—I’d also have the radio blasting opera, and the TV picture on (but not the sound)—and if all that didn’t clear enough out of my mind, I’d open a magazine, put it beside me, and half read an article while I painted. The works I was most satisfied with were the cold “no comment” paintings.
Ivan was surprised that I hadn’t heard of Lichtenstein. But he wasn’t as surprised as I was, finding out that someone else was working with cartoon and commercial subjects, too!
I had a very good rapport with Ivan right away. He was young, he had an “up” attitude to everything. He was sort of dancing around to the music.
For the first fifteen minutes or so, he looked through my stuff tentatively. Then he dug in and began to sort it out. “These blunt, straightforward works are the only ones of any consequence. The others are all homage to Abstract Express-
ionism and are not.” He laughed and said, “Am I being arrogant?” We talked for a long time about this new subject matter of mine and he said he had intimations that something shocking was about to happen with it. I felt very good. Ivan had a way of making you feel good, so after he left, I sat down and wrapped the Little Nancy cartoon painting that he said was his favorite and sent it over to him at the gallery with a red bow on it.
An excerpt from POPism: The Warhol Sixties, by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, published by permission of Harcourt Books, www.harcourtbooks.com.
