At Mason Gross I reencountered artists I already knew. But now they appeared to me in new ways, in new light, and with new meanings—visual meanings. The social meanings of their work, most important to me before, were fading. Process was becoming more important to me, how work looked as well as what it meant politically. Now I could concentrate more fully on how artists worked.
I had known about Andy Warhol for decades, since I was an undergraduate art major in Berkeley and he was making his way as a fine artist—as opposed to a commercial artist—in the 1960s. His commercial art had caught my eye because he borrowed a style of line drawing in ink from Ben Shahn, one of my favorite artists back in the day. Shahn drew with his own fractured line and was celebrated for it before Warhol picked it up in shoe advertisements. Both Shahn and Warhol had been graphic and commercial artists, and both used photography as a basis for their art. It was as though Warhol was channeling Ben Shahn, but shorn of resolute left-wing politics.
Ben Shahn, painter of social realism, drew, painted, printed, and photographed works of political consequence. Photographs showed him as a man of open countenance, like my parents’ progressive friends when I was young. The galvanized working class was his preferred subject, as in his famous depiction of the Massachusetts anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, martyrs of class struggle. Where Warhol was cool and ironic, an avatar of twenty-first-century art, Shahn was hot and righteous, a New Deal progressive to the end. If Warhol had made art about Sacco and Vanzetti, he would have shown them multiple times and in stunning colors—in the electric chair.
Shahn drew black people, too, as political actors, for instance, his poignant ink portrait of James Chaney in his homage to the three civil rights activists lynched in Mississippi in 1964 at the start of Freedom Summer. Shahn’s Chaney faces the viewer strongly, squarely, and straight on, in sharp contrast to the well-intentioned sympathy? pity? of Norman Rockwell’s contemporaneous painting The Problem We All Live With, a title—who’s a “problem”? who are this “we”?—I just could not abide.
Rockwell depicts brave little Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old desegregating her New Orleans primary school, from the point of view of her assailants. Talk about a lack of historical agency! In Rockwell’s image, Ruby Bridges occupies only about an eighth of the picture plane, dwarfed by four headless white male officials protecting her from vicious white supremacists. Shahn’s Chaney, in contrast, occupies one-third of a page dedicated to him, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1965, in which Chaney’s huge eyes glow with an activist’s intensity. Shahn’s political art inspired me, I knew that. Less obvious to me was a second route Shahn’s work took into my way of making art.
In high school I didn’t know to ask my art teacher, the second important influence on my art after my father, about influences on his art. Slender and enthusiastic, Teacher Sam Richardson from Oakland was a twenty-three-year-old MFA student at California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), just up the hill from my high school. He was in painting, as I would be much later, but he ultimately made his reputation as a sculptor, with work in several public collections, including the Smithsonian.
In high school I couldn’t see how art changes over time and how artists, having learned from those who went before, exert influence on those coming after. Now I can see Shahn’s influence in Teacher Sam’s squarish, pointy figures, his inky line and desaturated palette. Through Sam’s work, Shahn’s social realism found another way into my hand as well as my left-wing political heart.
Shahn died in 1969, before I ever met him. But decades later, on an art-school studio visit to Philip Pearlstein, a giant of figuration, I asked Pearlstein if he had known Shahn. Yes. Pearlstein had taught beside Shahn at Skowhegan. I pressed Pearlstein for details about Shahn, my image of a true-blue left-winger, the kind they don’t make anymore. I imagined Shahn, cigarette in hand, intensely criting students by day—the youth rolling their eyes at his old-timey techniques and stories (this would have been in the days when the New Left thought itself so much savvier than the Old Left of the 1930s)—Shahn nursing a scotch, urging students politically by night, and, trekking poles in hand, rallying activism in whichever acolytes he could round up to hike around Wesserunsett Lake. Alas, no such thing. Pearlstein remembered Shahn as an embittered drunk, a remnant artist in a slough of crapulent despond.
Even disappointed, I could half understand Shahn’s bitterness. He had mounted every step to Art World greatness—to world-world greatness, with honorary doctorates from Princeton and Harvard, delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, published in 1957 as The Shape of Content, a book I devoured at Berkeley in the spirit of its glowing reviews and heedless of its bitter denunciation of Abstract Expressionism, which, by then, was obliterating his work. In 1954 Shahn had been a featured American artist in the Venice Biennale, beside the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Nowadays The Art World reveres de Kooning; Shahn has disappeared. Andy Warhol, inheritor of Shahn’s line and crowned king of pop art, survives, bigger and more expensive every day.
Warhol’s pop-art glorification of American consumerism ran counter to my left-wing politics in the 1960s. Art, I assumed back then, was about critiquing this flawed world we live in, not putting its tawdry aspects on a pedestal and celebrating them as art. And was Warhol really making art? My naïveté doubted. Warhol’s blockbuster pop art—silk screens of someone else’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe, of someone else’s design of Campbell’s soup cans, of someone else’s Brillo boxes—just seemed like cheating. Just printing and coloring someone else’s work, not even doing it yourself. How could that count as really making art?
I didn’t then know the identity of the artist who had designed the commercial Brillo Box—I learned later he was an Abstract Expressionist named James Harvey whose day job in commercial art supported his painting. But I knew someone else’s work lay within Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Until Mason Gross I had never heard the word “appropriation” used approvingly, Warhol’s gift to fine art.
Warhol wasn’t the only pop artist (Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and James Rosenquist also come to mind), but he was the one who immediately appeared when you thought of pop art. A hit in 1964, Brillo Boxes upended what counted as art. It turned the philosopher Arthur Danto into an art critic. Danto’s article “The Artworld” coined that term and moved the definition of “art” from the work of art—the artifact, the thing itself—to the places where it’s displayed, bought, and sold. During the years I was in history, Warhol’s ways of repeating images, placing images into grids, and using familiar motifs took over contemporary art. In art school, I learned Warhol’s lesson of divorcing social meaning from visual meaning, for me, a gradual, step-by-step process.
Before art school, I approached art as though it illustrated social relations and history, upholding or denouncing the political status quo. During my years in art school I increasingly concentrated on visual meaning, on how artwork looked—its composition, its color, its artist’s style, as separate from what it said about society. Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation.
Coming from the Left, I began as an anti-formalist. But as a maker of art, I moved toward formalism as I sought to discover processes of how art was made, a move prompted by the neglect of the formal qualities of the work of black artists, assumed to be important only according to the degree to which it critiqued American racism. Where Romare Bearden had figured in my mind as celebrating blackness and black Harlem, I now investigated how he made his work, step by step, how he decided what to depict and how to depict it. I was now seeing my father’s prized Sharecropper, by Elizabeth Catlett, which he bought from her in her studio in Mexico, less as a salute to black workers and more as a masterly lino print. From the opposite starting point, my relationship to Warhol encapsulated my trajectory.
Warhol spoke to me as an artist, even though his personal affect—his spacey talk, his druggy Factory in New York City, his embrace of consumerism, his fascination with beautiful people in popular culture—all that felt alien to me then and still does to me now. And then there was his materialism expressed in a totally un-Marxian way: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” he famously said. “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Before art school, I never questioned my prejudice against this artist who seemed anathema in all he said and all he stood for. Then art school sent me in person to see his Maos.
Venturing into the oligarchic Gagosian Galleries on West 24th Street for “Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Works of Andy Warhol” required me as a humble little art student to fortify myself. Gagosian operates a string of galleries around the world so expensive that just going through its doors made me feel poor, probably you, too. I was used to galleristas ignoring me, so clearly not a wealthy collector. But Gagosian . . . Gagosian! I needed a makeover just to look around.
I did look around at Warhol’s Maos. Warhol started silk-screening some two hundred Maos after President Richard Nixon went to China in 1972. So Warhol did heed politics, in his own way. In 2015, a staggering manifestation of Warholian materialism sold one—just one—silk-screened Mao print for $47.5 million. But it wasn’t the millions—they were already selling in the millions when I was in art school—that knocked me back at Gagosian.
Eight or ten Maos at Gagosian, each about fourteen feet tall, staggered me, almost physically. I backed up, closed my eyes for a moment, breathed deeply to recover. They were breathtakingly beautiful—yes, that fraught word came to my mind, and in a good way, with unexpected, out-of-this-world brilliant colors and textures. Each image was different, though each image was based on the same template, a portrait of Mao Zedong from the Little Red Book. So again, Warhol was using some other artist’s work. But each Warhol Mao was original. The Mao silk screens turned my eyes around, converting me to Warhol.
NO CONVERSION REQUIRED to the work of Kara Walker, whose silhouettes inspired one of Artmaking Teacher Carin’s assignments. I was already familiar with Walker from a decade earlier, when she burst out of the Rhode Island School of Design with room-sized depictions of the sexual depravity of American slavery. Her combination of monumental scale and unconventional style bedazzled The Art World. Silhouettes had been ignored for over a century before Walker showed her work at the Drawing Center in New York, so her technique was not original. Her genius lay in making an outmoded technique contemporary, to depict historical trauma without line and without volume, and to feed The Art World’s taste for perversion that I had first encountered as a historian. Phenomenal success.
Research for my own book Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present had taken me into Walker’s work and inspired conflicting feelings. One silhouette depicts a quintessential Founding Father being fellated by a black girl while he sits on the shoulders of a naked crouching figure. In another image, an overseer figure sodomizes a naked black girl while pushing her along like a wheelbarrow. An elaborately clothed, moonlight-and-magnolias white courting couple kisses while a naked pair of legs betrays the presence of another person under her skirts. Much cutting off of limbs and raping through various orifices. Walker’s revolting scenes—so cunningly made—mash together what was and what might have been, history and fiction.
This art of atrocity can be hard to look at. Before it became a familiar part of American culture and people got used to it, Walker’s work dismayed black viewers who saw it as reinforcement of familiar, negrophobic stereotypes. That kind of response had inspired a backlash when Walker received a MacArthur “genius” award when she was only twenty-seven. It looked as though The white Art Establishment was rewarding anti-black art, having snubbed black artists forever. Older artists like Betye Saar, who had been making activist Black Power art for decades—and who had, not coincidentally, been ignored by The Art World—denounced the MacArthur as a reward for degrading imagery.
True, Walker often depicted her characters stereotypically, with rubbery lips, huge behinds, pickaninny hair, and monster penises. But at the same time, this stereotypical imagery was obviously meant ironically, as a critique of the American peculiar institution and made with enormous visual skill, artistic talent, and vision in the literal sense of the word. Knowing the history of slavery, I recognized the truth of that history in Walker’s work. After all, slavery was—still is—a pathological institution based on absolute power administered with whips. No whip, no slavery. Without physical violence, slavery cannot be sustained.
I included Walker’s work in Creating Black Americans, a history book, not an art book. There I was using Walker’s work to talk about history (not art history), which it does to perfection. This would change at Mason Gross, where her technique of historico-fictional mash-up fascinated me.
My Artmaking class brought Walker’s draftsmanship out from behind the history in her images. Now the lusts and hatreds of slavery, its depravity, even the girlish testament of her writing were much less pertinent to me than her process. Though my undergraduate colleagues doubtless learned something of the American past as they studied Walker’s technique, historical meaning hardly counted in Artmaking class as we studied the work’s formal qualities: what it was made of, how it was made, how it looked. For the first time I could concentrate on the surface of Walker’s art without being captured by its historical import.
I made three different silhouettes: one of a dramatic Alfred Bierstadt landscape, one of Johann Sebastian Bach at his harpsichord, and a third from Thomas Nast’s political cartoon of Irishmen rioting in nineteenth-century New York City. I collaged them together for one piece. For another, I collaged the negative pieces left over from the first piece.
LEFT: Positive Historical Silhouette, 2006, paper collage, approx. 8" × 10"
RIGHT: Negative Historical Silhouette, 2006, paper collage, approx. 8" × 10"
Now I can imagine creating art by putting Warhol and Walker together, as subject matter or as technique in the freedom of making visual fictions.
I had first approached visual historical fiction in a tiny little way at Princeton in my introductory painting class, where I was free to mingle my biographical subject, Sojourner Truth, and my favorite composer, Franz Schubert, starting with their shared birth year of 1797. I drew them together in a salon, where she sang and he played the piano, and in a Viennese-Austrian–Kingston, New York State courtyard, where they discussed her religion and his music. In colored felt-tipped pens, I drew a map juxtaposing Sojourner Truth’s lower Manhattan with Franz Schubert’s Vienna, his Danube and her East River.
History would not let me do that. But drawing took me a minuscule step out of my former realm of historical truth into visual meaning.