"I always say, before there was the soup can, there was the Nosepicker I."
—James Warhola

As a 20-year-old art student at the end of 1948, Andy Warhol created his first masterpiece. Widely exhibited and contextualized as his first self-portrait, Nosepicker I:Why Pick on Me (The Broad Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose), crudely renders the artist then still known as Andrew Warhola—immediately identifiable by his distinctive blonde hair and bulbous red nose—with a finger jammed up his nostril in a gesture that is at once repulsive and absorbing, playful and intimate. A rare example of a painting by Warhol’s hand, it perhaps evokes the expressive rawness of Jean Dubuffet more than the silkscreened aesthetic of Warhol’s later persona. However, Nosepicker I’s interrogation of reproduction, self-image, and so-called “good” taste epitomize the Warholian themes that already underpinned his revolutionary approach. Indicative of the iconoclastic genius that was to come, this incredible relic of one of the 20^th history’s greatest visionaries has remained in the artist’s family until now. 

 

According to James Warhola, his nephew, the subject was likely inspired by Warhol's brother's children. “As my father told the story, the little kids were always picking their noses, and my uncle got very perturbed about it,” Warhola recalled. “When he’d see my father, he’d say, ‘Can’t they stop?’”ⁱ Unsettled by this memory, Warhol employed the image of a young boy, finger crudely thrust up his nostril, in at least three works—a preliminary drawing and two subsequent paintings—during a particularly formative period in his early artistic development.

 

A senior majoring in “pictorial design” at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Warhol had begun to develop a close and heavily influential rapport with one of his instructors, Sam Rosenberg. With a keen interest in direct observation—he was renowned for his Pittsburgh street scenes—Rosenberg introduced Warhol and his classmates to an “intuitive” method of painting, privileging Ben Shahn and Paul Klee as innovators of a unique and liberated pictorial language. These 20^th century masters soon became two of Warhol’s most enduring influences; specifically, he was invested in the fluid and expressive contours they used to define images that were at once amusing yet sincere.

"I paint pictures of myself to remind myself that I’m still around."
—Andy Warhol

Following in the spirit of Klee’s pithy maxim—“a dot is a line that went for a walk”—he began executing humor-inflected paintings and drawings that traced his development of a new technique: “blotted-line” transferring. This idiosyncratic process, a version of monotype printing, became Warhol’s first aesthetic trademark and originally stemmed from financial necessity. The youngest child of a working-class immigrant family in Pittsburgh, the artist was obliged to work with the least expensive drawing paper, which caused the ink to run and smear unpredictably. But where others saw difficulty, Warhol saw opportunity: a means of slyly incorporating a form of printmaking into his practice that would echo the distinctive broken contours that Shahn manually produced. “How does he do it?” Ingrid Schaffner, the senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, elucidated his process. “Make a drawing in pencil. Go over it in ink, and while the ink is still drying, press down with another piece of paper. Voila: The blotted impression you lift up is the new original.”ⁱⁱ

 

As an early iteration of this new technique, Nosepicker I is one of Warhol’s first works in which the act of reproduction figures as an element of the medium itself. Betraying his predilection for seriality, the blotted lines that outline the subject and adorn the decorative background presaged a career later preoccupied with a form of more mechanical repetition: silkscreen printing. This postmodern interrogation of the multiple would also manifest itself in Warhol’s propensity to return to his own image time and time again in an iconic body of self-portraits. Beginning with Nosepicker I and spanning almost four decades, these traced his evolution from Andrew Warhola to rising ‘60s art world star, and then to one of the greatest figures of the 20^th century.

 

Soon after completing the work, he gave it a tongue-in-cheek title, The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose (occasionally alternatively referred to as the more polite The Lord Gave Me My Face…). He then sent his daring submission to the 39th Annual Exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in January 1949, where it greatly impressed one of the jurors: George Grosz, the prominent proponent of Berlin Dada and the New Objectivity movement, who had by then settled in America. However, Grosz and the second juror, who found it unforgivably repulsive, were deadlocked; in the end, it was refused inclusion on the grounds of its supposedly “offensive” subject matter. 

"You know, people want to see you. Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame—they feed the imagination."
—Andy Warhol

Undeterred and remaining confident in his first masterwork, Warhol resubmitted it—cleverly retitled Why Pick on Me in a subtle nod to the earlier rejection, intentional or not—to an exclusive summer group exhibition at the Arts and Crafts Center a few months later. Attracting much local attention for its audacious irreverence and formal inventiveness, Nosepicker I enjoyed, as art historian Dieter Koepplin reminisced, “a fine succès de scandale, largely because the stir it had caused had now become public knowledge.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

This story of Nosepicker I’s reception is a fitting metaphor for Warhol’s career, which saw him indefatigably pushing up against the walls of what was possible during his time. Relegated to the ranks of others who were turned away from academic salons for work that was considered too transgressive—Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh—Warhol was often ostracized from the mainstream art world for his engagement with commercial or “low” culture. In the end, these rejections only galvanized his success; his critics failed to realize that his main métier was the spectacle itself. 

The art historian Edward Powers linguistically deconstructed the different forms of “picking” at play in Warhol’s original title, The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose. Warhol can “pick” his nose with his finger, he elucidated, as he does in the present work, but he can also “pick” (as in, choose) his own nose, as he did almost a decade later when he pursued rhinoplasty to surgically alter his greatest cosmetic insecurity.^iv But in the same spirit he could also “pick” his own life, including one radically different from the stifling conventions of post-war routine—like the turbulent life of fame and glamour his later subjects picked. “His early painting of a nose picker was his first flamboyant self-depiction—here, as an ungainly, single-minded boy giving himself a little pleasure and relief, as if no one were watching, or as if a boy picking his nose were the most natural, riveting, and erotic sight in the world,” Wayne Koestenbaum expressed in his landmark biography of the artist. “So began Warhol's career: he strove to frame solitary bodies picking themselves, redirecting their anatomies with a broad's showy flair.”^v

 

Listen to the artist’s nephew, James Warhola, tell the history behind Nosepicker I below.

 

ⁱ Shirley McMarlin, “Andy Warhol's family plans to auction 10 art school paintings,” Tribune-Review, August 9, 2022, online.
ⁱⁱ Ingrid Schaffner, quoted in Gary Comenas, “Andy Warhol: From Nowhere to Up There,” Warholstars [blog], p. 10.
ⁱⁱⁱ Dieter Koepplin, quoted in Gary Comenas, “Andy Warhol: From Nowhere to Up There,” Warholstars [blog], p. 10.
^vi  Edward D. Powers, “‘All Things That I Didn’t Want to Change Anyway’: Andy Warhol and the Sociology of Difference,” American Art, vol. 26, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 56-58.
^v  Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, New York, 2001, p. 32.