Not P, Warhol

[Mark Kohut]

"in a little bio published in December 1960, the best Warhol could claim
for himself as an artist, {although he had
been exhibiting in galleries for years], was that he was doing a bookplate
for Audrey Hepburn's nursery."--Gopnik

His eureka moment, writes Gopnik, was when he realized the "low-art' of
magazine illustration and dressing windows,
that popular, commercial art, could glide effortlessly with the right
framing and genius choices into that new Pop Art movement
using and illuminating the anything of the times. From low puns to High
Art.


On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 6:55 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Speaking of Warhol, thanks David, whose birth family and mine were
> parishioners of the same Church in Pittsburgh. (If you go to the Andy Warhol
> Museum and look at Andy's grave webcam, where flowers and soup cans are
> placed on his stone and plot, average size,
> you will see in the upper left a gravestone that reads KOHUT. Yeahp, you
> can visit me there with my parents for all eternity soon enough
> after paying homage to Andy.)
>
> Gopnik's Warhol will be, after reading only a little, one of the great
> biographies. Because it is so wonderfully detailed, so wonderfully
> knowledgeable--he tackles all of the superficial--but many true since Andy
> is all human surface---ways of "explaining' Andy's work thru his life.
>
> I'll give two. He has found out that when his dad bought a new house when
> he was still a kid from a relative he paid cash--about 3 Grand if i
> remember, which took years
> of frugal non-drinking hard work, and which included Andy's mother selling
> vegetables and homemade things--but the the sale was recorded as for $1..
> Tax avoidance which Andy later also worked hard at......(I actually saw an
> example of this when I went one Friday evening to the Warhol Museum
> for a Reveal, first time ever, opening of one of Andy's time
> capsules...Andy used to periodically sweep everything in his studio into
> big boxes and
> date and seal and store them......This evening I saw IRS letters,
> receipts, maybe even a marked-up receipt, requests for others to send him
> letters re his expenses, etc. )
>
> And, Andy, whom I knew since his later art school years was seen as the
> one with the most natural draughtsman's talent any had ever seen, the one
> who entered art
> school with little to really learn and all his teachers saw it, was "the
> one we asked to help draw something when we hung stuff in the classroom"
> said HIS SECOND GRADE TEACHER!, whom Gopnik found and interviewed.
>
> Perfect circles by hand at will from the youngest age. As if hand-eye
> coordination was a tautology,  Sometime look up his pen and ink drawings of
> street life on the South Side of Pittsburgh, famers selling vegetables via
> trucks, etc.
>
> And there's more.
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 8:58 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Years ago I got about halfway thru The Recognitions.  It lost me in its
>> depiction of its Pynchon-like whole sick crew. As such, I never dove deep
>> into its questions about original Vs copied artwork.  Am I wrong to suspect
>> Warhol was his target?
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 6:32 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> https://twitter.com/sarahw/status/1256726554748628992?s=20
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>>