Andy's Analog Instagram Account

An unexpected treat awaited me at the Whitney when I went to see the Biennial.

Jed & Jay Johnson

Hundreds of photos that Andy Warhol took in the early 1970s with his ever-present Polaroid camera are exhibited in "Family Album."

I'll begin with the gay twins at the top:  Jed and Jay Johnson.  Andy put the California boys to work doing odd jobs at the Factory shortly after their arrival in New York City.  Jed eventually moved in with Andy, first to nurse him back to health after Valerie Solanas shot him, eventually becoming his both his boyfriend and a successful interior designer.  Archie liked him, too.  

You may have seen his crotch on the cover of Sticky Fingers.  The zipper still works on my LP, whose scandalous cover Andy conceived. 

But Jay was the stunner, at least in these photos.  

He took over Jed's design firm after his brother went down with TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Two of my housemates in the Pines encountered debris from the crash--never explained--during a beach walk.

Jay also exposed the Johnson family jewels in this oversize photo of the Factory crowd, shot in several panels by Richard Avedon.  "I think the first time I saw the final photograph was when it was at the Whitney for Avedon’s retrospective in 1994. I was a little surprised when I walked into the room and there I was, (second from the left) about 20 feet tall," he told Interview in 2012.  Can you imagine?

(partial)

Although he's been married to a man since 2011, Jay dated Jane Forth, a nice Catholic girl from Michigan, and introduced her to Andy who took a shine to her, too. Her loopy turn in Trash, sans eyebrows, caught the discerning eye of Diana Vreeland, the chief fashionista of the time, who tried without success to make her into a runway model. Too short!

Jane became a make-up artist instead, favoring the classic Hollywood glamor look.  She may have inspired Klaus Nomi in the decade to come.

Fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez 

. . . and a twenty-something Diane von Fürstenberg were among Jane's fans.  When the latter sat for Andy, her separation from Prince Egon was imminent. Not to worry--her wrap dress was just about to make her iconic in the fashion world and the Princess title helped.

Von Fürstenberg's German in-laws hadn't been thrilled by her heritage (they refused to attend to the couple's wedding reception) but Jonathan Horowitz included the Jewish-now-American-former Princess in his “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” plus ninety-two more" (2020), although I believe he used a later portrait.  She liked the early ones best.  By then, HIV complications had ended her ex-husband's life and she had married another gay man.

Andy loved him a royal.  Princess Caroline of Monaco (who's not looking at her phone, BTW!) was still single when he took this candid.

It would be another decade before Andy's portrait of her appeared on the cover of French Vogue, shortly after he silk screened an image of Princess Diana from her official engagement portrait by Lord Snowdon.

Clearly, taking Polaroids first enhanced the quality of the Warhol's silk screen portraits. Diana looks positively stuffy.

While gazing at Andy's Polaroids with as much concentration as a Russian drone spotter, I realized blank stares likely were a more common reaction, but many of the subjects were the bold-face names of my youth.  I pooh pooh parasocial relationships now, but the exhibition reminded me that I had one then, however infrequently maintained.

My part-time job at Bloomingdale's came with an employee discount to purchase designer clothing, including a wool, window-pane suit in smokey taupe with wide lapels and flared trousers (unlined, it itched terribly!) by Pierre Cardin

. . .  and a three-piece Yves Saint Laurent suit in green corduroy, with matching glasses (yikes!).  Saint Laurent is pictured with both Bianca Jagger

. . . and Jacques de Bascher, the boy toy he briefly stole from Karl Lagerfeld who has been depicted no less than three times in movies and on television (Yves Saint Laurent, Saint Laurent, and Becoming Karl Lagerfeld).  Meh.

My fantasy boy toys leaned more in the direction of Joe Dallesandro (sadly not pictured although Trash opens with a tight close-up of his bare buttocks) and Helmut Berger who looks a little like David in this shot. 

After seeing him in The Damned (where his buttocks are exposed) and The Romantic Englishwoman, I fell hard.  Looks like Andy may have, too.

Here he is with Bianca, barely visible behind her hat.  Said Andy in Exposures, his 1979 book:

Bianca Jagger is one of the most Socially Diseased people I know. She's almost as bad as me—and I'm terminal. She loves to go out every night to the hottest spot in town and make a big dramatic entrance in a big dramatic dress.

Bianca appears regularly in his family album although Studio 54 didn't open for another four years.  She lived in cottage on his Montauk property.  Looks like it came with a meal plan.

Although it's hard to tell from this photo of Truman Capote (the best of several in the show), Andy idolized the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms. 

The precocious young author's photo on the book jacket may have been a factor.  Fame is a harsh master.

Photo by Harold Halma (1948)

I couldn't imagine that Patricia Neal--an actress who had won an Oscar before a debilitating stroke--and Andy ran in the same circles but she had recovered enough by the early 1970s to make a comeback. He probably found it appealing.  Having seen Giant earlier this summer, his blurry photo had an added resonance.  Neal's TV ads for Maxim instant coffee, which leveraged her prestige and plummy voice, were a major part of the comeback--her second--but they also contributed to the end of her marriage. While on set, Roald Dahl, her husband, met the woman with whom he would have a lengthy affair before finally leaving Neal, the mother of his five children.  

Here's to you, Andy--ninety-eight years after your birth, you're still finding ways to give me vicarious pleasure!  And thanks to the Whitney Museum for providing access to his analog Instagram account.

Piazza San Marco

Operation Mincemeat (5*)

I expected laughter not tears but this splendid London import elicits both in a stirring mix of vaudeville and valor that can't help but remind audiences that once upon a time, war was mission-driven and strategic.

British comedy isn't usually my thing and for the first several numbers I found Operation Mincemeat, based on historical events, a little difficult to follow, except in the broadest possible terms.  World War II intelligence officers, including Ian Fleming (Allison Guinn, definitely playing against James Bond type), line up to pitch ideas for dispatching Hitler, cutting ahead of Charles Cholmondeley (a perfectly elastic Brandon Contreras).  A nervous Nellie with a thing for newt anatomy, he's got an out-of-the-box plan to pass along fake intelligence to the Nazis via Spanish Republicans using a dead body which a more polished officer with a secret side gig, (Gerianne Pérez, showboating shamelessly) runs up the flagpole.  A junior staffer with ambitions to do more than serve tea (Lexi Rabadi, yearningly feminist) and a secretary of a certain age (a spit-curled Jeff Kready, wearing a pearl lanyard, who embodies Keep Calm and Carry On dignity) join the unlikely team.

Has a talented cast ever worked as hard as these five gender-bending performers who, among them, play at least 50 additional roles, changing costumes at often breakneck speed?  The night I saw it, three were stand-ins (Guinn, Pérez and Rabadi) which probably contributed to the undeniable electricity on stage, enough to power a data center.

Two numbers will remain forever etched into my theater-going memory, which stretches all the way back to one of the show's inspirations:  "Dear Bill," a faux missive devastatingly sung by Kready, in which English rose gardening becomes a metaphor for the awful human losses incurred by war, and "Useful," a sly, gentle duet (Kready again, with Rabadi) that quietly affirms the value of service and mentorship regardless of recognition and completely devoid of bombast.  

The crackerjack creative team, comedians all (David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, Felix Hagan and Zoe Roberts, the first three of whom also starred in the original cast), manages a feat rare even for theater gods like Hal Prince, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse: steadily building engagement and excitement from beginning to end.  This includes kicking off the second act with a show stopping Gestapo rap ("whose side are you on?" asks Guinn, after the audience bursts into ecstatic applause).  But "A Glitzy Finale," as delightful as the number that ended A Chorus Line (which opened exactly half a century before Operation Mincemeat debuted on Broadway) also makes time to pay tribute to the homeless Welshman whose body facilitated the Allied invasion of Sicily, something that the creators of Dead Outlaw, another terrific corpse show, skipped.  

I left the Golden Theater remembering an Armistice Day visit to London in 2016, when red poppies, representing a traumatized nation's desire for a permanent end to the mass slaughter caused by World War I, were pinned to people's lapels and scattered across fountains nearly a century later.  At precisely 11 a.m., the entire country stopped to observe two-minute silence in remembrance of the "glorious dead."

That startling commemoration, just three days after Trump's first election,  thrilled me with nostalgia for a time when we could both honor history and learn from it.  Like one of the Operation Mincemeat team says (if only to scattered applause):

If people like us just blindly follow orders, the fascists won't need to bash the door down. They'll have already won.

Dogs (4*)

And here I thought Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life, would forever wear the crown of miserabilism but C. Mallon snatches it from her head with Dogs, a blistering novella that increases trauma's intensity if not duration.

Mallon, acutely sensitive to color and light, writes very much like Caravaggio paints except we're in a godforsaken, wide open part of America where blotto is the typical teenage destination. Self-harming Hal has a better reason to get there than his three buddies, including sweet, blond Cody John whose gentleness does not go unpunished.  They're all members of the wrestling team, driving around in a junker several nights before Halloween after Hal's mother serves the boys spaghetti and meatballs that he refuses to eat for initially opaque reasons.

I had to put Dogs down more than once because Mallon gets inside Hal's messed-up head so completely that it hurt to read.

I was throwing off some type of unstable heat. Blue hollow down in the center of a butane torch. Bad radiation. Hole-punching scraps out of anyone caught in my radius, lung matter, heart muscle, brain tissue. Pink living brain. I took a part so small nobody noticed it gone. I understood myself to be a crippling weight to carry. I understood myself to be a total nightmare all the time.

Hal isn't wrong; the only solace he finds other than alcohol and pills is Tough Guy, a furry and non-verbal companion animal.

Let's hope the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Mallon the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction this year for the viscerally poetic quality of his prose, not his unrelenting shame and despair. 

We get enough of that already from the newspaper. 

Ideas As Art

Better Mona with a mustache than a urinal to introduce a post about a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.  Fun fact:  if you pronounce the name of the painting in French, it sounds like you're saying "She has a hot ass."  I beg your pardon!

"L.H.O.O.Q" (1930, replica after 1919 original)

MoMA's curators take a chronological approach which establishes the French artist's bonafides from the outset.  Already restless making traditional art in his early twenties, he painted this glowing radiologist, a childhood friend, with the aura of a supernatural healer. X-rays had been invented only 15 year before.

Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (1910)

Apparently Duchamp adored his father, a notary and former mayor of his hometown, even more than influence Paul Cézanne.  Dad not only encouraged his son's creativity; he and his wife raised three other successful artists, too.  By the end of the show, it occurred to me that only a beloved child would have the confidence to go his own way with Duchamp's humor and determination.  There doesn't seem to be anything tortured about him.

"Portrait of the Artist's Father" (1910)

Duchamp did for players of his favorite game--for which he eventually abandoned art making--what he did for a nude descending a staircase a couple of years later.  The latter caused a major brouhaha when the 1913 Armory Show (America's introduction to modern art) exhibited his painting.  In both works, he blends Cubism with Futurism.

"Chess Players" (1911)

Around the time the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Duchamp ditched oil painting and embraced "Readymades" which pretty much got the conceptual art ball rolling.  Ordinary manufactured objects (never hand-made) like a bottle rack, considered his first Readymade, became art when one "chose" him and he signed it.

It chooses you, so to speak. If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved, bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art. The idea was to find an object that had no attraction whatsoever from the aesthetic angle.

Over three decades, he "produced" only thirteen Readymades, which also included "In Advance of the Broken Arm" (a snow shovel, 1915) and most famously, "Fountain" (a urinal, 1917).  The latter literally broke the art world.  The mustachioed Mona Lisa above fell into a different category, a "Rectified Readymade," because it required more "work" than a mere signature.

Duchamp left France for America in 1915, using the money he earned from the sale of three paintings at the Armory Show two years earlier.  Much to his surprise and no doubt delight, New York greeted him as a celebrity.  He even accepted a commission to paint in oil one last time, on a canvas sized to fit above a bookcase in his patron's library's.  Three dimensional, with a protruding bottle brush, it also incorporates Readymade shadows and reflects Duchamp's often sarcastic wit:  the French title may be short for "You annoy me" or "You bore me."

Tu m' (1918)

Duchamp's Readymades were an early expression of Dada, an international "anti-art" movement that emerged from World War I.  In New York, Duchamp met and collaborated with Man Ray on a motorized sculpture.  Its testing nearly injured America's most prominent Dadaist which, a century later, would have made a good basis for an Onion headline.

"Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics)" by Marcel Duchamp (1920)

The two artists found themselves in Paris at the dawn of the Jazz Age, where Man Ray photographed Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego (and another French pun meaning "Eros, that's life").  Rrose already had appeared on the label for Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, an "Assisted Readymade." In 2009, a collector paid a cool $11.5 million for the perfume bottle which also appeared on the cover of the only issue of New York Dada ever published.

"Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy" by Man Ray (1923)

My taste in art runs to the figurative, which accounts for the delight I took in an utterly unique homage that Florine Stettheimer paid to Rrose and her progenitor.  It may very well be the only time a well-known 20th century artist painted another in drag.  Duchamp frequently attended the avant garde salons hosted by the three unmarried Stettheimer sisters in their Upper West Side apartment, along with Francis Picabia and Marsden Hartley. He also helped ensure the legacy of the notoriously private Stettheimer who eschewed trying to sell her paintings: two years after her death in 1946, Duchamp curated a retrospective of her work at MoMA, which her will had stipulated should be destroyed, in perhaps the most Dada move of all!  Alas, the New York Times review was more redolent of mid-century sexism than critical insight:

Florine Stettheimer's art pays its roguish, absurd, debonair and affectionately irreverent tribute to the smart New York world of the Twenties and Thirties. Much of it may be deemed inconsequential, when measured strictly as art, though all of it adds a kind of indispensable thistledown glitter to the period it adorns and reflects. 

But the credibility conferred by the exhibit on her mostly unseen work made it possible for sister Ettie, her executor, to place it in other museums, where a now more enlightened culture continues to appreciate it.  

"Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy" (1923)

The Dada bros clearly had a blast in Paris.  Drag or shaving cream--what's the diff?

Marcel Duchamp with Shaving Cream by Man Ray (1924)

In some ways, Dada was like today's expiring photos.  By the mid 1920s, Surrealism had supplanted it.  But the always inventive Duchamp wasn't quite done.  He shifted his focus to a forerunner of Op Art.

"Disks Bearing Spirals" (1923)

In 1926, he and Man Ray produced a short film by creating disks with pen and ink, adding puns and spinning them on phonograph turntables.  This one says: "Let us escape the bruises of the Eskimos who have exquisite words."  With Anémic Cinéma --attributed to Rrose Sélavy, of course--MoMA acquired its first Duchamp in 1938.  By then, the daddy of Dada was playing chess more often than creating new art (he played internationally and earned "master" status).

As hard as it is to believe now, Duchamp never really tried to earn money from the sale of his work, relying instead on his inheritance, teaching (he tutored Stettheimer in French) and serving as an art adviser and dealer.  However, he did try marketing an invention, colorful "Rotoreliefs" that he trademarked, copyrighted and entered into a a 1935 inventor's fair competition.  Priced at 15 francs (~$2.50) they probably would have been a hit during the Summer of Love.  Although Duchamp failed to earn his investment back on an initial edition of 500, he won an honorable mention at the fair.

By then, Duchamp was nearly 50.  But instead of suffering a midlife crisis, he declared "Everything important that I have done... can be put into a small suitcase" and set about proving it.  From 1935 to 1941,  he assembled 69 miniature reproductions of his artistic oeuvre to date, essentially curating his own retrospective before any museums had decided he was worth collecting (the phrase "fiddling while Rome burned" comes to mind, legacy caretaking does seem particularly critical when it comes to conceptual art).

 Reproductions for Box in a Valise

After Duchamp immigrated to the United States in 1942, Peggy Guggenheim exhibited what Duchamp called a "Box in a Valise" at her Art of this Century gallery in New York City, where he told Alexander Calder that he should call his hanging constructions "mobiles," a name that stuck.

Series C

When I learned that Duchamp produced more than 300 of these boxes over the remainder of his lifetime, enlisting the help of people like Joseph Cornell, I was reminded of the Ford Motor Company's assembly line and Andy Warhol's Factory but who knew that Marcel Duchamp was the bridge between the two?

Series F

However you want to tag Duchamp--as the father of conceptual art or the daddy of Dada--one thing remains absolutely certain: he was a master networker.  Alexander Liberman, the big cheese at Condé Nast, commissioned Duchamp to design a Vogue cover celebrating Americana in 1943.  He submitted something that resembled George Washington vertically but became a map of the United States when turned horizontally (one can only imagine what he might have come up with for our semiquincentennial).  Liberman said no way, but the Duchamp's assemblage found a home at VVV, a Surrealist magazine the following year.

MoMA has filled an entire gallery with replicas of Duchamp's most famous works.  

The exhibit ends with a delightful surprise:  two years before his death at the age of 66, Duchamp sat for one of Warhol's famous "Screen Tests."  He definitely looks like he's in on the joke.

He probably would have appreciated the chess boards just outside the exhibit, too.

He famously played a match at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 with Eve Babitz, a California babe who would eventually become frenemies with Joan Didion.

Photo by Julian Wasser

I also checked out Frida and Diego: The Last Dream, the museum's first collab ever with the New York Metropolitan Opera.  Works of both artists from MoMA's collection are exhibited in a gallery conceived by the set and co-costume designer for El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego which premiered at the Met last spring.

Frida name checks Ford in this early, unfamiliar work.  Check our the letters on the four smokestacks beneath the American flag.

"Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States" (1932)

"Tree of Hope, Remain Strong" by Frida Kahlo (1946)

I'm guessing this must be the tree opera fans see on stage at the Met.

As much as I enjoy Frida's narcissism, I also feel like Diego gets short shrift after a visit to Mexico City where seeing his frescoes, murals and Mesoamerican art collection were revelatory.

Self-Portrait, 1930

He's represented in this exhibit by his costume and set designs for H.P. (Caballos de vapor), the ballet-symphony completed by Carlos Chávez in 1936.