Andy Warhol's Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol

The sum of two units pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.--Susan Sontag, "Notes upon Camp," 1964 (1)

Sometime in late 1948 or early 1949 during his final year of art institute at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol changed his diction According to one of his classmates, he had been working in a manner indebted to Aubrey Beardsley that had earned him regard and interest from his associate students and the support of the sum of two units most widely respected instructors when his friend and classmate Philip Pearlstein convinced him to gaze for a new influence. (2) Apparently, Pearlstein informed Warhol, a certain quantity of of the more conservative faculty did not approve of the influence drawn from Beardsley. This criticism was probably not focused sole on the decorative prettiness of the Beardsleyesque drawing style--from his art place of education days through the 1950s, Warhol regularly made drawings with drawn out and flowing fine lines, for example, and repeatedly ornamented with fine speckles, intricate lists and intermittent strands of ink--or upon his use of untoward or indecorous control matter, something Warhol was routinely enthusiastic about as well. Also suspect, no doubt, was the Beardsley legacy of tainted ambition for the social place of art. (3) The charged mix of innocent form and les than decorous subdue matter in Beardsley's delicately drawn grotesqueries had serv various extreme points in the 1890s, of course, not the least of which was to threaten more [i]or[/i] less of the loftier social distinctions made in the name of art by dint of opening its preserve to baser social ambitions and practices: "May not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries, and the designers of affiches artificial position as proudly in the public organ of sight as the masters of Holland Road or link Street Barbizon," he could move in 1894, for example, while savoring the imagined affront that "London will by and by be resplendent with advertisements." (4)

The young Warhol would have had limited knowledge of this history. He came to position his work similarly between innocence and worldliness (thereby moving toward his eventual association during his art seminary years with Beardsley) by another path, single that I will be exploring here at a certain number of length. (5) Since childhood, he had been particularly absurd of making art inspired by the agency of various contemporary mass-cultural sources, and he had a special and long-lasting obsession with the child star Shirley fane (6) Temple, it will be demonstrated, provided Warhol with something that would work for him well throughout his career: she protoplasted a manner of operating in the world--a turn of expression or comportment--that mixed both child and adult functions and attributes, the two innocence and savoir faire. Like Beardsley's utopian image of London, the figure of fane was also "resplendent with advertisements," of course; that is, her persona and her appeal were irrevocably tied to her exceptional social and economic position as a star. on the other hand despite the appeal and succes of this early influence, when challenged by the agency of several of his art instructors Warhol accepted the criticism and sought on the outside a new influence. As individual classmate put it (perhaps a little too bluntly) "Andy painted the way he wanted and they flunk him. for a like reason he went to summer institute and painted the way they wanted." (7) Downplaying the Beardsley line and sublating the mixed bearing and beaming sheen he drew from fane he took on the 1930 Social Realist themes, and coarse, ragged-line, blotted-ink drawing diction of Ben Shahn.

What I undertake here is an analysis of influence: the influence of sum of two units very different sorts of artists, Ben Shahn and Shirley fane and two very different sorts of social parts for artists, those of the moralist and the darling, upon the work of Andy Warhol. It is the meeting in 1948 or 1949 of these sum of two units artistic influences drawn from distinct and largely discrete agricultures of the 1930s--the fellow-traveler agriculture of the Red Decade upon the one hand and Hollywood's of gold age on the other-and its significance for Warhol's tremendously influential work of the 1960 that is the make subordinate of this paper.8

At the center of my investigation will be a particular version of influence--that which approachs with passing, or adopting an identity in order to gain access to a realm of legitimation and authority not otherwise available? In the case of Warhol, as it has been for many others, passing also harbored a supplemental function. Not alone did it provide entree into restricted circles, it also carried a significant capacity to tip over the criteria that maintained the boundary between inside and outside passed above in the first place. At this instant in its social economy, when it serv as a liberalizing agent subverting established values, Warhol's passing became camp and was no longer be of importance toed with convincing impersonation but instead with manifest pastiche and with developing an independent cultural economy of its have a title to This critical, transformative function of camp is the feature that Susan Sontag and many others after her have investigated, championed, and critiqued. "Camp is a menstrum of morality. It neutralizes m oral indignation," Sontag wrote in her still influential if drawn out controversial 1964 essay "Notes upon Camp," an essay very aware of Warhol. (10) A lock opener source for Warhol's peculiar faculty for passing, it will be demonstrated, was Shirley fane Where Warhol was most fortunate at passing and, ultimately, greatest in quantity influential at camping, it will be shown was when he donned the guise of the 1930 "proletarianized American petit-bourgeois intellectual" Ben Shahn. (11)