HOWZAT

Warhol wanted to become an avant-garde painter like Johns and Rauschenberg. He tried to meet them, but was shunned. They wanted nothing to do with him because of his commercial background, which they shared but openly disdained, and because of his sexuality, which they also shared but, to protect their careers, kept screened from public view. “Johns was a formidable person, very closed,” says d’Offay. “Here was some luvvie, annoying, gay person from the fashion world trying to muscle in on their success. They didn’t want anything to do with him.”

After attempts to meet them, he turned to a friend. “Why don’t they like me? Why can’t I be a painter?” Warhol’s career was at an impasse. He told the art director Charles Lisanby that he wanted to be Matisse. He wanted the recognition that comes to a serious artist who changes the way we look at the world. As the Sixties began, the time was right for Warhol. He was steeped in the culture of products and consumption. He knew about American desire. Coke bottles had appeared in his drawings, but he began painting them on their own, in pure, flat colours. They were risky, non-painterly – more like commercial art than what high art was thought to be about.

A handful of people sat up and noticed. The art historian and Pop Art enthusiast Henry Geldzahler, who worked at the Metropolitan Museum, encouraged him to paint more. Ivan Carp, assistant to the powerful dealer Leo Castelli, recalled that, “When I saw Warhol, [Roy] Lichtenstein, [Claes] Oldenburg and [Tom] Wesselmann within a four-month period, I had a sitting-up-in-bed kind of feeling, thinking there was something very strange going on in the art world.” From the start, it was clear that Warhol had the talent and temperament to go much further than any of the others. But the response was still almost uniformly hostile. Of Warhol himself, one dealer observed that he was like “something that had crawled out from under a rock. He was the most colossal creep I had ever seen in my life.”

In July 1962, Irving Blum put on a show at the Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood of his Campbell’s Soup Cans. The soup cans were his artistic turning point, giving him the signature he had been looking for. At first, there was silence from the critics. By 1964, however, something about Warhol’s paintings had begun to touch a chord. As the Sixties went on, and Warhol’s chilly icons of American life defined his era, he became the media superstar he had always wanted to be.

Ironically, in the end, Capote, Johns and Rauschenberg all wanted to be part of Warhol’s circle. Hundreds flocked to join him in the spotlight. He used the media to turn his life into his greatest piece of conceptual art and, in all this, his earlier work was largely forgotten. But, as will be seen in this exhibition, that early work was so delicate and delightful, so intelligent and so emotional, that it still stands up against those famous Pop masterpieces.

Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life and Death, sponsored by Bank of Scotland, is at the Royal Scottish Academy, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, August 4 to October 7

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