COMMENTARY : Andy Warhol & Company--Rethinking the Art of the Sell

High name-recognition value certainly accompanies the show of early graphic work by the late Andy Warhol, which opens Sunday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. For an art that grew from advertising, it’s only fitting.

Still, Pop art of the 1960s remains among the most widely misunderstood artistic movements of the 20th Century. It certainly has enjoyed crowd-pleasing notoriety almost from the very start. But, maybe because of all that raucous public clamor, resistance to clear-eyed examination remains surprisingly strong. Pop easily bypassed slower traffic on the road to posterity, and annoyed the art world’s mandarin gate-keepers no end.

The clearest sign of the confusion is that the two most common readings of the art are completely contradictory to one another. With its soup cans, comic strips and sleek Hollywood glamour, Pop is claimed to be: a.) a buoyant celebration of the spectacular machinery of consumerism, advertising and all the new visual languages of mass culture; or b.) a withering critique of the vacant soul of consumerism, advertising and all the new visual languages of mass culture.

Only a fool would deny that popular culture has something to do with Pop art. Only a fool could deny that art culture has something to do with it too. In fact, it’s turning out that Pop’s great triumph emerged from its purposeful inquiry into the gassy, suffocating rhetoric that characterized American painting by the end of the 1950s. Arriving at a moment of nerve-wracking vacancy in the precincts of culture, Pop art assumed the role of Abstract Expressionism’s pointed nemesis.

The great, sprawling retrospective of Andy Warhol’s career mounted last year at New York’s Museum of Modern Art offered one welcome occasion to rethink the Pop phenomenon. The mammoth show focused principally on Warhol’s paintings of the 1960s. Some people groused, complaining that even so large an exhibition drew an incomplete profile of its subject, but I thought the choice was just right. Warhol, still respected only grudgingly, needed to be emphatically represented at his peak. At the Modern, painting after painting from the 1960s made the brilliance of his work virtually inescapable.

With its forceful emphasis, the show provided a perfect foil for still another shot of re-examination. The Grey Art Gallery at New York University assembled a compact survey of the dozen years Warhol worked as a prosperous commercial artist. Unexpectedly, this gathering of mostly 1950s magazine graphics, newspaper advertisements, menu illustrations, fabric motifs, record-album covers, book jackets, Christmas card designs and photographs of department store window-dressing treatments began to answer complex questions about where the great paintings of the 1960s, resplendently installed up the street at the Museum of Modern Art, had come from. “Success is a job in New York . . .: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol� became the sleeper-hit of the Manhattan art season.

It’s too bad the Warhol retrospective came nowhere near California on its international tour. “Success is a job in New York . . .� almost didn’t make it, either. Thanks to some 11th-hour juggling, however, the Newport Harbor Art Museum was able to squeeze the show into its schedule (it will remain through March 18).

Miss the exhibition only at your peril, for lots of interesting points of convergence between Warhol in the 1950s and his Pop efflorescence in the 1960s await amiable discovery. The funniest is in a 1952 photograph of the 24-year-old artist, made with his art-director friend, Otto Fenn. By overpainting with black ink, Warhol’s profile is made sleek and model-handsome, transforming the ethnic features of his Czech ancestry into an All-American look. This wittily altered photograph anticipates by a decade the famous “Before and After� painting based on a plastic surgery advertisement for a nose job.

The opportunity to think about Warhol’s Pop art in relation to his commercial work of the previous decade is surely welcome. But try examining his commercial art while keeping the contemporaneous backdrop of Abstract Expressionism firmly in mind. Therein lies the key to understanding Pop.

The reason is that much Pop art of the early 1960s can be productively thought of as Abstract Expressionist ideas represented by commercial, graphic images. A gritty style of newspaper advertising is employed to that end, for example, in Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 paintings in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lichtenstein’s “Meat� shows a cut of raw beef. “Strong Hand (The Grip)� shows muscle-building equipment. “Desk Calendar� shows a daily notebook with appointments logged. Together, these “raw, muscular, autobiographical� paintings compose an imagistic anthology of value-laden Abstract Expressionist language, concocted to describe the earlier paintings of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and the rest.

Then there’s Edward Ruscha. Also at MOCA is his 1962 “Annie,� whose title is written in fluid maple syrup--a drip-painting if ever there was one.

As for Warhol, the critic Dave Hickey began a similar decoding in last summer’s number of the quarterly magazine Parkett. Most famously, the nearly interchangeable splash-and-dribble of paint in late Abstract Expressionism was colloquially known as “soup�--so commercial-artist Andy turned to Campbell’s.

The existential pain of the ‘50s became the spur for all manner of Andy’s tabloid images of personal disaster--�129 Die!�--while his pictures of electric chairs pointedly included signs invoking Beckett’s Silence. Pollock’s romantic legend had been heroically capped when the automobile he was driving smashed into a tree, so Warhol painted car crashes. Marilyn, Jackie and Liz took turns playing the role of De Kooning’s powerful women, while the energetic directive for the artist to get “inside� the painting, bodily, is played out as footstep-pictures of dance diagrams.

Once you get the hang of it, you can find Ab-Ex cliches all over the Pop map. Off the top of my head, I’d add to Hickey’s list Warhol’s enormous paintings of flowers, taken from a garden photograph in a seed catalogue: With the old, abstract expanse of color across the canvas now replaced by grass and blossoms, they literally became the “field paintings� described in painterly rhetoric of the day.

The show coming to Newport Beach is fascinating because it puts the advertising processes of commercial art in the foreground, and they are at the core of Warhol’s Pop strategy. His job, as a commercial artist, had been to find concise, compelling images with which to sell purely abstract concepts, such as “sophistication,� “uniqueness� or “casual elegance.� His new job, as a Pop artist, was to do the same for Abstract Expressionist concepts, such as “the tragic,� “the sublime� or “the transcendent.�

Warhol’s Pop sold the image of art--or, more precisely, sold the reigning American image of art in the 1950s.

Today, a generation after Abstract Expressionism’s phenomenal rise to international prominence, it’s hard to imagine just how inspiriting the situation must have been: For the first time, ever, an American artist could be of international consequence.

At least, some could. In his memoirs, the art dealer John Bernard Myers tells of painter Helen Frankenthaler’s calculating decision in 1958 suddenly to leave his gallery: Her new husband, the influential artist Robert Motherwell, did not approve of his wife being represented by a homosexual. And in the Grey Art Gallery catalogue, Trevor Fairbrother relates an incident in 1959 in which, for similar reasons, Warhol’s paintings were rejected for a show at the prestigious Tanager Gallery: The macho, male-dominated milieu of the New York School, now legendary, couldn’t exactly accommodate an effeminate gay fop like Warhol.

The dissonance in “high art� subject matter shown as “low art� commercial imagery describes, in aesthetic terms, the conflict between Abstract Expressionism’s grand, universalist rhetoric of existential freedom and the vulgar reality of its exclusionary social milieu. “Success is a job in New York . . .� reveals how Pop’s most exalted subject is its eloquent drama of personal freedom.