Victor Bockris talks to Harry Pye
Harry Pye: Your book on Warhol is always described as the definitive biography and the most revealing and most impressive. Who wrote the 2nd best book on Warhol? (Which Warhol books receive your personal seal of approval?)
Victor Bockris: Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s by Reva Wolf, University of Chicago Press, 1997. On&By Andy Warhol Edited by Gilda Williams, MIT Press, 2016. Reading Warhol by Klaus Schrenk and Armin Zweite, Museum Brandhorst Hate Cantz . These are my current favorites because I am writing a book about Andy Warhol’s Writing. I believe it is a rich field and the missing link to digesting the full impact of Warhol’s oeuvre.
The portrait painter Humphrey Ocean believes Warhol had the best use of colour of any artist since Matisse. In your book we learn Warhol's unrequited love, Charles Lisanby, believed Warhol told people he wanted to be Matisse but only because whatever Matisse did was seen as important. Do you think Warhol genuinely had a talent for choosing colours and a unique feel for colour. And that his least good work in the 80s happened because he let assistants make the decisions?
Humphrey Ocean is right, Warhol made great use of colour and often took some time to chose the colours he was going to use in a painting. Several years ago The New York Times published a huge review of a show of Warhol’s last painting run from 1977-1987. The article emphasized the extraordinary variety of painting methods he employed and in particular the strength and beauty of his colours. Warhol is a much greater painter than most critics judge him to be. There is a whole new generation of people writing about Andy who never met him never saw him in action and come up with absurd notions to try and draw attention to how clever they are. We are a long way from recognizing the artistic value of what he did in all the fields he entered.
In what way was Warhol a bad man? (The makers of the film, Factory Girl obviously believe Warhol treated Edie shabbily).
I don’t think Andy was a bad man. Andy made Edie The Queen of the Factory and treated her extremely well. When she left the Factory for the Dylan group in Woodstock he was extremely hurt, but he tried to help her when she returned to New York with a bad drug problem. I think he was a good man. He helped countless thousands of people. He helped bring talents they did not know they had out of the people who worked with him. There was a hard side of him. Nobody could have done the enormous amount of collaborative work he did in the inferno of the Silver Factory in the 1960s without being a very tough man. He was playing with gasoline in a room full of fire. Many people hated him for what he did and stood for. I don’t think anybody who knew Andy well hated him. He was a complex man a great romantic parading at times as a nihilist. He had learned from his mother how to play people off against each other and he could drive his assistants crazy by constantly pushing them to carry out his plans. So did Winston Churchill. Bear in mind the Factory was the most thrilling place on earth for those committed to him. And he was in the process of changing the world. Once we are able to fully digest what Andy Warhol contributed I don’t think people will be asking if he was a bad person. He was a great person. He was the greatest artist of the 20th Century.
When Warhol died a batch of his Cookie Jars sold at Sotherby's for £247,830 - did Warhol ever give you presents that, in theory, are now worth a fortune? Or, do you have any precious possessions that you would never part with?
In 1978 Andy gave me an Electric Chair Print he signed in 1971. In 1979 he gave me a Drag Queen Print, and in 1981 my favourite of all he gave me a hand painted water colour of a blue flower from 1974. Had I been able to keep them I imagine they would be worth a lot of money. But I sold them to help support the writing of my Warhol biography. He also once painted a grey suit I was wearing during a public event and later signed it in two places.
The critic Robert Hughes saw Warhol as being a dull businessman - are you upset when Warhol is disrespected? There’s a track on ‘Songs For Drella’ where Lou Reed sounds furious when remembering the newspaper at the headlines announcing Warhol's death ("Pop goes pop artist / Is Warhol really dead?")
If I was upset by every writer who criticized Andy superficially I would have died years ago. I am not interested in people who put Andy Warhol down to make names for themselves. I am interested in people who are intelligent enough to begin to grasp the edge of his achievements and who may use their insights to open the work to others who want to get it.
I’ve read Warhol was a fan of Goya and The Renaissance painters — what art moved or inspired Warhol?
Warhol was a huge fan of good painters. He liked the pop artists, he liked Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings. He loved the great abstract expressionists. He loved Duchamp and de Chirico, he loved good painting. Andy was a lover of art. He was a super intelligent, civilized, well read man who came out of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. He had an almost Russian sense of suffering. He loved above all good talkers.
Bob Dylan claims Warhol’s Empire State Building movie is more exciting than any Bergman film. Increasingly I've noticed artist friends say Warhol's movies are the most impressive things he did. Which of Warhol's films are better than Bergman’s? Also, were they really his films (was the best stuff by Paul Morrissey?)
There are several layers of Andy’s film making, from the silent movies to the talkies, to the comedies. He was always looking for special people who burned through the screen. He was dead serious about what he was doing in film and his films had a huge impact on cinema from the late sixties through the seventies until today. Edie Sedgwick was his favourite actress because they worked so exquisitely together to produce e.g. Beauty #2. Chelsea Girls was the climax of that kind of film making. Its success along with the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico blew his mind. He shot a lot of other films in 1967 – 1968 that were only shown once. The films he made in the aftermath of the shooting — Blue Movie (the last film he directed), Women in Revolt and the trilogy Flesh, Trash, Heat were made in collaboration with Paul Morrissey, but please note that when Morrissey worked without Warhol he received little recognition for his own films. The actors were working for Andy. Those are still Warhol films.
Warhol had a big crush on Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran. Do you think Warhol was having crushes on young heterosexual men knowing nothing would happen between them or do you think he was confident enough about his looks etc to think he was in with a chance of developing relationships with them?
Andy kissed a lot of straight boys but he didn’t go further than that. The downside of being Andy Warhol was that he was an acutely lonely man. Despite living with Jed Johnson for twelve years, he never had a happy love life. There was a deep well of sadness in the depths of Andy’s soul.
Andy's mother was a Catholic, we know he attended church regularly in his later years and even painted a version of the Last supper after Leonardo da Vinci. Was he a true believer? Were his religious sensibilities a correlation of the banality mode which allowed him to appear slightly detached from the real world?”
Andy was truly a religious man. His belief in God was constant. He had survived his father’s death when he was thirteen and his mother’s near death the following year by praying. It was the sort of thing he would rarely talk about.
‘All Tomorrow Parties’ was said to be Warhol's favourite Velvet Underground song and Lou Reed acknowledged Andy inspired the lyrics of several of his lyrics particularly, Vicious. But did Andy love Rock & Roll as much as classical music? And, what do you think was his favourite piece of classical music?
Andy really did produce The Velvet Underground & Nico by putting Nico in front of the band and getting Lou to write songs for her. No first time recording band could have gotten away with what they did without Andy’s strong support. He played a lot of current songs from the Stones, The Supremes etc. And he liked punk rock, but he was more into the theatre of it and the gender bending people who excelled at it. When he took long plane rides he usually listened to the kind of operas Billy Name and Ondine used to play at the Factory like La Traviata. Maria Callas was a favourite. God knows what it was like to be Andy Warhol. There will never be anyone like him ever again, because his intersection with his times came out of the end of World War 2 and all the liberating movements that came out of the people who survived it. He is certainly a much more important player in his times than say Richard Nixon.
Text and drawing © Harry Pye 2020
Victor Bockris has written brilliantly about the cultural heroes of the twentieth century for three decades. Le Document whole heartedly recommends Victor’s book on Lou Reed, Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story; The Velvet Underground Story, Up-tight and Warhol: The Biography.
TATE MODERN EXHIBITION
ANDY WARHOL
12 MARCH – 6 SEPTEMBER 2020
