Entertaining account of why Americans bought Warhol's vision of art

JOHN FANNINGreviews Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the WorldBy Gary Indiana Basic Books, 175pp, $22

AS PROBABLY the best-known American artist of all time, Andy Warhol has triumphantly outlasted the 15-minute threshold of fame. Books about the man and his life continue to pour off the presses. The latest focuses on his iconic painting of the Campbell’s Soup can but also manages to provide a succinct outline of Warhol’s colourful life.

With just over 150 pages of text, the book is similar to an extended essay. But the author, Gary Indiana, a novelist, playwright, film historian and art critic, manages to get to the heart of his enigmatic subject with economy and style.

We learn of Warhol’s poor background in industrial Pittsburgh. A sickly child, he was the youngest of three boys and his father died when he was 14.

Warhol, who was interested in art from an early age, attended art college, moved to New York to work in commercial art and, like many leading artists and writers of the 20th century, received early sustenance from the advertising industry.

Warhol lived with his mother, sharing a bedroom with her and 17 cats; apparently the smell was appalling. But in the early 1960s he achieved the fame he sought so diligently with a series of paintings of American icons from Marilyn to Elvis via Brillo and Campbell’s Soup cans.

The Campbell’s Soup idea was actually suggested to Warhol by an art dealer, who said: “Why don’t you paint something people see every day, like a Campbell’s Soup can?” Warhol immediately sent his mother out to buy all 32 varieties of the soup in the nearest grocery shop.

Fame and fortune soon followed, but these gods exact a high price. Warhol ended his days in the company of what the author sniffily describes as second- and third-string heiresses, princes, arms dealers, and the sons and daughters of military dictators.

Indiana captures Warhol’s strange personality in a few deft brushstrokes: “cryptic obviousness”, “awesome immaturity”.

As an artist, he flattened the distinction between high and low culture. Art was expected to be deep and solemn; Warhol showed that it could be light, capricious, improvisational and saturated with illogical chaos and humour. Pop art was less intimidating and more instantly understood; it was populist rather than elitist and it celebrated people and products that everyone could identify with and understand.

Indiana sums up the movement brilliantly: “It moved the world of art into the realms of objects previously unperceived as commodities – the art gallery and the supermarket came closer together – the effect was not to rescue American banalities from banality, but to give banality itself value.”

Describing the artistic worth of Warhol’s achievement is more difficult. This book argues that it captured the widespread fear felt by Americans about being taken over by consumer lifestyle in the 1950s, but that it ultimately celebrated that very same lifestyle as people came to terms with it in subsequent decades.

Warhol, the author believes, clarifies what underpins American culture: commodity, consumption and celebrity. His paintings were not expected to “mean” anything; they were simply what they were and they had no “latent content”.

Warhol’s influence was powerful in the decades that followed, culminating in unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde. But we may now be on the cusp of a renewed search for “meaning” as the preoccupation with “mockery, irony and archness” starts to pall. A new debate centred around this issue will have to take account of Warhol and his legacy, and this entertaining, thought-provoking book is a good place to start.

John Fanning is the author of The Importance of Being Branded: An Irish Perspective(Liffey Press, 2006.) He is also a non-executive director of The Irish Times Ltd