Andy Warhol in a New York City street, Spring 1965. Picture credit: © David McCabe. From Andy Warhol "Giant" Size (Phaidon).
By Kenneth Goldsmith
Essay excerpted from Andy Warhol "Giant" Size (Phaidon, October 2018)
Andy Warhol—then known as Andrew Warhola—arrived in New York from Pittsburgh in the summer of 1949 and immediately began making the rounds of advertising agencies and magazines in search of work as a commercial illustrator. By the end of his first week in the city, he landed a major assignment from Glamour and was on his way to becoming one of the most successful commercial illustrators of the 1950s. Warhol's success was largely due to his invention of a blotted-line technique, whereby he would take a pencil drawing, trace it with ink and, while it was still wet, press the drawing onto another sheet of paper, creating a spontaneous-looking line that delighted art directors with its original "handmade" look. This was enhanced by his mother's shaky cursive texts, which would accompany his illustrations. His appearance—disheveled and pimply—earned Warhol the nickname "Raggedy Andy" among professionals in the field.
I came to New York on a bus. And went with my portfolio to a magazine, and the lady just liked the things and said to come back when I got out of school, and that’s how it started.
Passport photographs, one of which Warhol altered with pencil to make his hair appear fuller and his nose thinner, 1950’s. Picture credit: Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum. From Andy Warhol "Giant" Size (Phaidon).
Throughout the 1950s, Warhol accepted assignments from all the major fashion magazines, including Mademoiselle, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, as well as from such stores as Tiffany & Co., Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman. His illustrations knew no bounds: he designed album covers, book jackets and newspaper ads, and even illustrated the raindrops, suns and clouds used in early-morning television weather reports. His largest client, however, was I. Miller, a shoe company that brought him industry-wide recognition and several awards from the Art Directors Club. Beginning in 1955, Warhol created stunningly original interpretations of shoes for I. Miller, often using his blotted-line technique, as well as collages of gold foil and silver trim. The illustrations were published almost weekly as half-page ads in the New York Times.
Warhol's production was ceaseless. Throughout the decade, he created a number of artists' books—as well as countless drawings—that employed his groundbreaking commercial art techniques, using imagery as varied as cats, boys, nudes, feet, fruit and flowers, to name but a few.
Andy Warhol Piglet, from Wild Raspberries, 1959 (lithograph with hand-coloring in watercolor) and Shoe and Leg, circa 1955 (offset lithograph and watercolor on paper). Both works were auctioned at Phillips in 2017.
In the midst of his commercial success, however, Warhol always had ambitions of placing his work in a fine-art context. In June 1952, he had his first fine-art exhibition in New York at the Hugo Gallery on East 55th Street with a series of drawings based on the fiction of Truman Capote. And in October 1954, Warhol had the first of two solo exhibitions at the Loft Gallery, an art space that was attached to an advertising agency's studio. In February 1956, Warhol had his first of two exhibitions that year at the Bodley Gallery, where he showed portraits of various men; in December, he exhibited shoe drawings.
The year 1956 also marked Warhol's first appearance in a museum context, when his shoe pictures were included in a survey show at the Museum of Modern Art. Two months after the show closed, Warhol offered to donate a picture to the museum's permanent collection but received a personal rejection letter from the director Alfred Barr. The snub seemingly did little to hurt Warhol's boundless ambition, which would eventually garner him a posthumous exhibition at the celebrated New York museum thirty-three years later.
Andy Warhol "Giant" Size, photo edited by Steven Bluttal, with an introduction by Dave Hickey (Phaidon)
Learn more about Phaidon's series of Andy Warhol books and tune into our panel discussion livestream on Thursday 11 October at 6:30pm EDT—featuring art critic Blake Gopnik, The Whitney Museum of American Art's Donna De Salvo and The Andy Warhol Foundation's Vincent Fremont, moderated by Arnold Lehman.