By David Dalton (New York Times)

Overview

Depending on your point of view, Andy Warhol is the greatest American artist of the second half of the 20th century or a corrupter of art who destroyed painting and took us down the slippery slope of postmodernism. He is either a cultural transformer or a purveyor of campy kitsch. Descriptions of his personality range from “legendary sweetness” to “cold as a meat locker,” naïf peasant to cynical sophisticate, fine artist to con artist. In the first part of his career he was an iconoclast, in the second, the artist as businessman.

From Warhola to Warhol

Why such diverging views? Well, look at his origins. As the only Pop artist to come from a blue collar background, he was an enthusiastic believer in the American Dream, but coated it with a layer of icy camp. Born in 1928 into the slums of Pittsburgh, Andrew Warhola was the fourth child of immigrant parents who barely spoke English. Just how odd and remote from mainstream America were his origins can be seen in “Absolut Warhola,” a hair-raising and hilarious documentary about Micková, the village in northeast Slovakia his parents came from. Andy was a sickly, often bedridden child, who played with dolls, idolized Shirley Temple and at an early age began drawing women’s shoes, cartoon characters and movie stars.

By the time my sister, Sarah, and I became Andy’s first assistants in 1962, he was a successful commercial artist, famous for his whimsical drawings of shoes, cats, flowers and angels. Still, he craved recognition as a fine artist, and had begun making brutal paintings of nose jobs and campy reproductions of comic strips. His first iconic image, a painting of a Campbell’s soup can, would appear later that year. It was an idea he’d bought from the gallery owner Muriel Latow for $50.

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