Blake Gopnik

Edited extract from a phone conversation between Nicholas Chambers and Blake Gopnik, April 2017.

Nicholas: I’m speaking on the phone with Blake Gopnik, who’s joining me from New York where he is working on a comprehensive biography of Andy Warhol that will be published by Harper Collins. Blake is also an unofficial consultant for Adman, who generously shared many insights into Andy’s early career as the exhibition took shape. Adman focuses on Warhol’s pre-pop career in New York, but I want to go back even earlier and chat about his first art experiences as a child and young adult. Blake, could you paint a picture for us of the art scene that Andy would have experienced growing up in Pittsburgh?

Blake: One of the things that surprised me most in researching my biography of Warhol is just how good the art scene was in Pittsburgh in the 1940s and, especially, how good his art school was. He went to a school that was commonly known as Carnegie Tech – the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. It has a certain reputation as an art school now, but at the time it really was one of the best art schools in North America. Really avant garde, really cutting edge in both its pedagogy and in the art concepts they taught there.

One of the major influences on Andy Warhol in Pittsburgh was a professor of his called Balcomb Greene, who at that time was really close to being a superstar in the art world across North America. He was one of the pioneering abstractionists in the United States and then moved on, at just the moment that Warhol met him, to reject abstraction and start to be interested in representation – a central element in Warhol’s own success.

Greene was a very, very influential figure and, luckily, we have his lecture notes which reveal exactly what he taught Warhol on a day-by-day and week-by-week basis, and the classes are full of the most interesting modern art and radical modern culture of the day. He taught Bertolt Brecht, the playwright. He taught Stravinsky and radical music.

Warhol’s education gave him a fabulous foundation for what he went on to do in New York in the 1950s and 60s. That seems to be surprising only because Warhol always presented himself as kind of a holy fool, a dope, someone who came to his success by accident. He frequently said that he hadn’t been trained at all, that he was totally self taught. In fact, the first time he ever appeared in print as a pop artist he said that he never went to art school, which was absolutely untrue. By the end of his art education, he was one of the star students at Carnegie Tech. He was a sophisticated artist right from the beginning and Pittsburgh helped him become that.

Nicholas: What about his exposure to American and international art in the 40s? Were there opportunities for him to see great works of art during his youth?

Blake: Yes, one of the wonderful things about Pittsburgh – a city that we now seem to think of as existing on the margins, as it were, of American culture – was that at the time it was really one of the up-and-coming cities. It had steel money, it had Frick money, it had Carnegie money, and its public institutions, museums and libraries were really superb. In fact, the Carnegie International Exhibition held every year at the Carnegie Museum of Art was the second oldest international exhibition of art in the world and one of the most important ones.

Warhol, of course, got to see that every single year. He got to see the most important work from all over the world when he was 10, 11, 12. Then, once war hit, he got to see the most important work from the United States.

Nicholas: One of the most often told stories about Andy’s childhood is that he was encouraged by his mother to attend weekend art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Blake: Yes, he was one of several hundred students who gathered at the museum every Saturday morning to attend art classes. In fact, one of the things I discovered is a photograph of a bunch of art students sketching inside the gallery of the Carnegie International Exhibition. One of them has a kind of mop of blond hair and, to the extent that we can zoom in on this picture, it looks not at all unlike a 12-year-old Warhol.

Interestingly, when you go through the records, you realise that the classes were quite avant garde. Warhol’s love of the cutting edge really starts when he’s eight, nine or ten and never leaves him.

Perhaps surprisingly, the city was really a hotbed for the latest in modernism and a lot of that came because of this one gallery, Outlines Gallery, which really was one of the most important venues for modern art in all of North America. It only lasted six years – 1941 to 47 – and they were precisely the years when Warhol was coming of age as a young artist. The gallery showed everything that was cutting edge and also had an amazing program of avant-garde film like nowhere else really in North America except the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Nicholas: Was there a collector base in Pittsburgh that made a commercial gallery like Outlines sustainable?

Blake: There was no collector base whatsoever in Pittsburgh. The owner complained that she almost never sold anything. In fact, when she sold things, it was almost always to herself and her husband – which is why she closed in 1947. Luckily, she was from a very wealthy family so she was able to keep her gallery going for as long as she did.

Nicholas: But, presumably, there was an audience for the exhibitions?

Blake: There was at least a small audience of people who admired the gallery and a larger audience of people who came to mock and jeer. The local press is 80 percent against the wacky modern artists that she showed and maybe 20 percent in favour. While Pittsburgh had a good modern-art culture, the public was also not hugely receptive towards it. It went against the local grain. Warhol, of course, was always interested in going against the grain – always committed to resisting the mainstream.

I think his attitude made special sense, in Pittsburgh, because the avant garde was understood there as having a lot to do with outsider art. And I’m using that term very broadly, to apply not only to folk art by untrained artists, which was a Pittsburgh specialty, but also to great modern artists like Paul Klee or Alexander Calder who adopted outsider aesthetics. In Pittsburgh, outsider art was shown as radical modern art and that’s what’s really important to recognise, since a lot of the art that Warhol went on to make has outsider elements in it. His 1950s illustrations, in particular, were built on a charming – but false – naiveté. They were often praised for their ‘childlike’ qualities. His 1960s pop art – and especially his pop persona – also had an element of the naïve in it.

I think it’s important to mention here that Warhol’s ‘outsiderism’ also had roots in his sexuality. He was a pretty out homosexual already in Pittsburgh in the 1940s when it was incredibly dangerous to be gay. He wore white nail polish and some portraits of Warhol by his classmates, like Philip Pearlstein, very clearly show him being aggressively and deliberately ‘limp wristed’.

Nicholas: It’s interesting to think about the extent to which he was quite overt about his sexual identity at college. Presumably, he found quite a supportive environment there. We know, for instance, that he made great friends and, in fact, subsequently flatted with several of them in New York. What do you think the college environment was like for a young, overtly homosexual Warhol?

Blake: One thing that’s important about his art education is that a number of his professors were gay. They may only have been barely out of the closet, but they were at least a little bit out and I’m sure that that made Warhol’s own sexuality much easier for him to bear, even in homophobic Pittsburgh.

But the Warhol of the 60s that we know so well – the sphinx-like, almost-silent Warhol – is not at all the Warhol of the 40s and 50s. Almost everyone who speaks about him from the 1940s and 50s remembers him as this absolutely charming and sweet figure. Not at all the cold, calculating, Dracula-like figure of the later 60s.

It’s really important to recognise that the Warhol of Adman is actually, in almost every way, a different Warhol than the Warhol that we know so well from the silver factory in the 1960s. There are hints of that already in the Warhol of the 1950s, but they’re not developed until the 1960s.