Jessica Beck

Edited extract from a phone conversation between Nicholas Chambers and Jessica Beck, April 2017.

Nicholas: I’m speaking on the phone with Jessica Beck, associate curator of art at The Andy Warhol Museum, who will be taking care of the Adman show when it travels to Pittsburgh in early 2018. Adman is an exhibition about Warhol’s formative years in New York. It explores his interconnected practices as a commercial artist and as an up-and-coming fine artist. But it’s also an exhibition that deals with the formation of ‘Andy Warhol’. We included numerous photographs in the exhibition as a way of speaking to the construction of Andy’s persona and, Jessica, I’d like to start by talking about the first thing that visitors encounter at the exhibition here in Sydney – a group of photographs of Andy taken by Leila Davies Singelis.

Jessica: Leila was a close friend of Warhol’s, part of his inner circle of friends that he moved to New York with or found in New York after graduating from Carnegie Tech, which is now Carnegie Mellon. She captured Warhol in the really nascent, beginning period where he’s goofing around in the photographs in front of store windows with men’s underwear hanging in the front window. These images expose a younger, more innocent version of Warhol, an unexpected image of Andy Warhol.

Nicholas: They show Andy soon after he arrived in New York. I think the earliest one is dated 1950 (of course he arrived in late 49). One of the things that many visitors find surprising is that he really looks completely different to the image of Warhol they have in mind.

Jessica: Well, they show the quirky ‘raggedy Andy’ persona that he crafted in the 1950s – he came across as naïve and innocent and playful. It’s interesting because Warhol thinks of his persona as equally as important as the work that he’s making.

Nicholas: Further on in the exhibition there are a group of very intimate images, taken by Andy’s friend Edward Wallowitch…

Jessica: Edward Wallowitch is someone that I really find fascinating at this early point in Warhol’s career. He is an emerging, aspiring photographer. He started taking photographs at the age of 11, and was acquired by the Metropolitan at the age of 17. He and Warhol are equally ambitious, and had a friendship as well as an intimate relationship. So these photographs reveal two sides to Warhol. On the one hand they speak to a work relationship – Andy used a lot of Edward Wallowitch’s photographs for his commercial work and actually some for his paintings in 1961 – while on the other they suggest an intimate relationship too. It’s interesting that Warhol blends both this intimate side of his life and the professional, business side together.

Nicholas: Directly opposite these photos we have installed images by another photographer with whom Warhol had a friendship, as well as a professional relationship. I’m thinking here of the two photographs by Otto Fenn. In both of these images, we see Andy surrounded by mirrors, his face reflected numerous times. Particularly interesting, however, is Andy’s alterations to one of the photographs, using a pen to modify the shape of his own nose.

Jessica: During the 1950s, Warhol put great emphasis on his physical appearance and the importance of crafting an artistic persona. An example of this fixation is illustrated very beautifully in the Otto Fenn photograph in which he contours his nose with a dark marker. This idea of wanting to change his own face and features. We know by 1956 that he did have elective plastic surgery. It’s interesting to find him manipulating his own image in this photograph. He’s definitely fixated on his physical features and how to transform them and how to integrate, I think as well, into this certain glamorous space that he was trying to enter.

Nicholas: Of course Warhol and Fenn, who was a fashion photographer, were often producing work for the same kind of outlets, magazines such as Vogue, Glamour or Harper’s. The difference, of course, is that Andy is working in illustration at a time when photography is very much on the rise. Many years later, reflecting on the 50s, Warhol makes the comment that ‘no one was using illustration on the covers at this time’. Despite having carved out a space for himself as an illustrator, he was utterly fascinated by photography.

Jessica: Yes, definitely, photography, from the very beginning of his emergence in the art world, was always there. He always had a close relationship with cameras and photographs and having other photographers around him, photographing him. This is why we have hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Warhol from his college years, like you have in this exhibition, but all the way up to the end of his life – he had a close relationship with other photographers, and his own fascination with cameras and new photo-technology, and how to incorporate photography into his work. Growing up in Pittsburgh, he grew up with a photo booth in his backyard, so we have photo images of him as a young boy, at the age of seven. Warhol always had a really close relationship and also fascination with photography. Definitely it’s the underlying theme that happens during these commercial days, into 1961 – some of those first Campbell soup paintings, for instance, are actually Edward Wallowitch photographs that he uses as source material.