Read I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Online
Authors: Kenneth Goldsmith
The legendary artist Man Ray figured prominently throughout Warhols career. In the elegant art deco sitting room of his Upper East Side town house, Man Ray’s painting
, Peinture Feminine,
occupied a prominent place between a Cy Twombly abstraction and an early Roy Lichtenstein. In 1981, photographer Christopher Makos photographed Andy Warhol in drag, which directly referenced Man Ray’s portrait of Macel Duchamp in drag posing as Rrose Selavy, done in the early 1920s. And Warhols massive 1978 painting series entitled
Shadows
took its cues from Ray’s
Interrogation of Shadows (1919).
On November 30, 1973, Andy Warhol shot a series ofPolaroids of Man Ray in his Paris apartment as preliminary studies for a painted portrait. In the piece below, Andy recounts the day’s events in minute detail. Present in the apartment were Man Ray and his wife; Warhol and his associate Fred Hughes; and the Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino and his assistant Dino
.
On an audiotape made of the session, we hear Andy request that Man Ray keep his hands away from his face, put his cigar in his mouth, and remove his glasses for the portrait. With opera playing softly in the background, Man Ray asks technical questions about the camera while the Polaroid whizzes and clicks. As the session winds up, Fred Hughes asks Man Ray to sign his name on a piece of paper, in case Warhol decides to silkscreen it onto the finished painting (in the final portrait the signature was not included
).
Warhol was introduced to Man Ray by Anselmino, a Turin-based art dealer who also represented Ray. He had commissioned Warhol to do an edition of one hundred prints of the Man Ray portrait. When Andy went to Italy to sign the prints, Anselmino wanted to commission a larger body of work, which led to Warhol’s notorious series of black and Hispanic men in drag
, Ladies and Gentlemen (
1975
).
This piece was transcribed by the present editor with Greg Pierce and Geralyn Huxley from the Andy Warhol Museum. It is printed here in full for the first time
.
–KG
WARHOL: “What am I to talk about? Talk about what? Nobody told me what to talk about.”
[pause]
“Oh, um . . . You mean writing a letter to Man Ray?”
“Oh.”
“Uh. . . Man Ray was this wonderful person that uh. . . that uh. . . Luciano . . . Luciano Anselmino introduced me to. And he was uh . . . really cute. And uh .. . the only thing I can really remember is. . . is a toilet. Because on his toilet he had uh . . . this stocking and uh . . . it was just so great because it was . . . it was the only toilet I ever knew that had a covering on it. And uh . . . the . . . his place was so cold but he was so rich and uh . . . and it looked like a little tenement but it was next door to the richest house in Paris.
“And he was really cute. He took a picture of me and I took a picture of him and then he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and then I took the one of him and then I took one of Dino and then Dino took one of me and then I took one of Dino again and then Dino took another one of me and Man Ray. And then Man Ray took one of me and Dino. And then Dino took another one of Man Ray and me. And then I took one of Luchia . . . Luciano. And then Luciano took one of me and Man Ray. And then Man Ray took one uh . . . of me and Dino and Luciano. And I think his wife got in this time. And then . . . then he took a picture of Fred Hughes. And then he took a picture of me again. And I took another Polaroid of him. And then we had the Super X . . . the camera 70 . . . Super 70–X uh. . . . And then I took one of um . . . uh . . . And then I took another picture of Man Ray and then I took another one of Man Ray and then I took another one of Man Ray. Then I took another with my uh . . . uh . . . with my funny camera. Whafs it called? The funny camera? It’s called the uh . . . the portrait camera. And so I took another one of Man Ray and I took another one of Man Ray and I took another one of Man Ray. And then I think he signed one . . . one of them. And then I took another one of Man Ray. I took another picture of Man Ray, another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray, another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and then another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and then I took another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and then I took another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray. And then I took another portrait. And then I think he took another portrait of me and then he signed that one for me and I put it in my sss . . . in my Brownie shopping bag. And then I had to go back and look at the toilet seat again because it was the best thing in the apartment. And uh . . . if Luciano really loved me he would get me the toilet seat.
“We’re now pausing for identification.”
[pause]
“Okay. Here we go again. It’s. . . . And then I remembered. I uh . . . dropped my camera and then I had to pick it up again and then I thought, well, gee, you know, Man Ray, I mean I only loved him because of his name, to be very truthful. That was the only . . . I thought his name was the best thing about him. Until I met him. And uh. . . . He had the best name. Well, I was . . . I . . . I just thought and I’d met him once uh . . . I think he wrote a book. And he . . . he . . . he uh . . . he said he was from Philadelphia and he made up his name and then I really was so disappointed because I found out his name was uh . . . Schwartz and uh . . . and uh. . . . now they tell me his name is Rabinovitz. And uh. . . . And so then I took another picture of him. And I took another picture of him. And I think I took another picture of him. I took another one and another one and another one. Then I had to change my roll of cam . . . film because that was eight in . . . eight in a roll so then I put it in, pulled out the black thing and then I took another picture of him and another picture and another picture and then I put a light bulb in and another picture and another picture and another picture and another picture and another picture and another picture and then I put. . . . That was eight pictures. And then I had to change my camera again and I took a SX-70 and then I put a whole roll in and I got ten . . . ten pictures out of that and then he put a cigar in his mouth, because Luciano handed him a cigar and he liked to smoke cigars. I think they were friends because Luciano brought him the best cigars and uh . . . in town. And actually the cigar was bigger than he was because he’d . . . he’d gotten very . . . very bent over. And . . . or maybe very uh. . . . He looked like he was always far out but uh . . . I think it was just because he was bent over. And then I gave him uh . . . I put another . . . I took ten of the uh . . . SX-70s and then I took uh . . . changed it to the portrait camera and uh . . . I had him smoke the cigar and then I took four more pictures and put some more light bulbs in and then I took . . . I took four more pictures and uh . . . put some more light bulbs in and then I put in some more. And then Dino was taking some more pictures and uh. . . . That was really fun. And uh . . . and Man Ray had the most beautiful uh . . . wife. God. And uh . . . he was so adorable. And uh. . . .”
“And uh. . . . We uh. . . .”
This interview was conducted at the third “Factory” at 860 Broadway, probably in early June 1977. I was the editor in chief of Andy Warhol’s
Interview
from 1970 to the end of 1973, when I left to go to work for
Rolling Stone
. After a strange and brief tenure there I spent a year in Chicago working for
Playboy
. I returned to New York in 1976 and renewed my friendships at the Factory. I was working as articles editor at
High Times
at this time and I proposed a cover story on Andy. He was happy to accept.
The interview took place over about 90 minutes–the time of one tape. I had thoughts about some of the things I wanted to ask, like if he was the richest artist, but mostly the interview was improvised. Andy was on that day and there was no need to go any further. I don’t like the
Playboy
Interview approach of spending days on an interview and piecing a text together from hours of tape; ours was a normal, real time conversation. I guess it’s Aristotelian, real time and naturalistic.
We talked in the panelled “Board Room” while staffers came and went, including Fred Hughes, Catherine Guinness, Bob Colacello and Ronnie Cutrone. We were interrupted now and then by the normal course of Factory business and paused the tape, but Andy didn’t take any phone calls. He would just answer questions from the crew as they stuck their heads in. That was a more normal way of doing it for him, rather than quietly concentrating, one on one, which would have made him nervous. When he couldn’t think of an answer he might ask one of his employees the question, but that’s part of Andy’s sense of humor.
I cut out a few things for length, but the interview was done in the accurate, warts-and-all style that we developed at
Interview
. We didn’t try to turn things into “good writing” but wanted to keep the flavor of a real conversation and the genuine voices of the participants.
Andy was very happy with the interview. I think he liked the questions, but most importantly, he thought he sounded smart and funny. Shortly afterward he asked me to come back to
Interview
and write a music column. I did and began writing the
Glenn O’Briens Beat
column which ran for 12 years.
–Glenn O’Brien
O’BRIEN: What was your first work of art?
WARHOL: I used to cut out paper dolls.
O’BRIEN: How old were you?
WARHOL: Seven.
O’BRIEN: Did you get good grades in art in school?
WARHOL: Yeah, I did. The teachers liked me. In grade school they make you copy pictures from books. I think the first one was Robert Louis Stevenson.
O’BRIEN: His was your first portrait?
WARHOL: Maybe.
O’BRIEN: Were you in an art club?
WARHOL: No. But if you showed any talent or anything in grade school, they used to give us these things: “If you can draw this,” where you’d copy the picture and send it away. . . .
O’BRIEN: Famous Artist’s School?
WARHOL: Uh, yeah.
O’BRIEN: Did you send them away?
WARHOL: No, the teachers used to.
O’BRIEN: Did they say you had natural talent?
WARHOL: Something like that. Unnatural talent.
HIGH TIMES: Were you arty in high school?
WARHOL: I was always sick, so I was always going to summer school and trying to catch up. I had one art class.
O’BRIEN: What did you do for fun when you were a teenager?
WARHOL: I didn’t do anything for fun, oh, I think maybe once I went down to see a Frank Sinatra personal appearance with Tommy Dorsey. You had to take a streetcar to get there.
O’BRIEN: Did you work after school?
WARHOL: Yeah, I sold fruit.
O’BRIEN: At a fruit stand?
WARHOL: No, on a fruit truck.
O’BRIEN: So, how did you decide to become an artist and move to New York?
WARHOL: I went to Carnegie Tech. Phillip Pearlstein was going to New York during a semester break, so I took a shopping bag and we took a bus. We took our portfolios and showed them around New York to see if we could get jobs. The lady from
Glamour
, Tina Fredericks, said that when I got out of school she’d give me a job. So I got out and came back. That was my first job.
O’BRIEN: A free-lance job?
WARHOL: Yes. She gave me a shoe to do.
O’BRIEN: What was your ambition in those days? To be an illustrator or to be a fine artist?
WARHOL: I didn’t have any ambition.
O’BRIEN: What was your first work that really pleased you as an artist?
WARHOL: I don’t remember. I did get some prizes in school. It wasn’t my best work. One time after summer vacation I did some fruit truck pictures. I won five dollars.
O’BRIEN: Who was the first artist to influence you?
WARHOL: It must have been Walt Disney. I cut out Walt Disney dolls. It was actually Snow White that influenced me.
O’BRIEN: Did you go to the movies a lot?
WARHOL: Yeah, on Saturday morning. If I took the neighbor’s baby I got to go to the movies free.
O’BRIEN: When you went to art school at Carnegie Tech, what artists influenced you?
WARHOL: Carol Blanchard, she used to do ladies falling out of bed. She did Lord and Taylor ads, and she was in the Carnegie International Show.
O’BRIEN: Were you up on your art history?
WARHOL: Oh, yeah. We had a wonderful teacher named Balcolm Green. He gave slide lectures.
O’BRIEN: Who were your favorite movie stars in those days?
WARHOL: Ray McDonald
1
and his sidekick. What’s her name?
O’BRIEN: Who is Ray McDonald?
WARHOL: A dancer. And he had a wonderful girl partner. And Abbott and Costello, the Andrews Sisters, Lucille Ball, Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, Alexis Smith, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Zachary Scott, Vida Ann Borg and Roy Rogers. Every one of them.
O’BRIEN: Is there anyone you wanted to be like when you grew up?
WARHOL: Uh, who was Charlie McCarthy s father? Edgar Bergen.
O’BRIEN: Were you interested in any politics?
WARHOL: I listened to the speeches on the radio–Truman’s.
O’BRIEN: Were you impressed by him?
WARHOL: No.
O’BRIEN: What were your favorite radio shows?
WARHOL: “Let’s Pretend” and “Jack Armstrong, All American Boy”; all the good ones. “Little Orphan Annie.”
O’BRIEN: Did you like comic strips?
WARHOL: Yeah, “The Katzenjammer Kidz.”
O’BRIEN: Did you ever do cartoons?
WARHOL: No. I could never think of a good person to draw.
O’BRIEN: Do you think there are any great undiscovered artists?
WARHOL: Uh, yeah, there are. But it’s more important to make money now.
O’BRIEN: What advice would you give to a young person who wanted to become an artist today?
WARHOL: I’d just tell them not to be one. They should get into photography or television or something like that.
O’BRIEN: Do you think the art world is dead?
WARHOL: Oh, yeah. Being a wallpainter or a housepainter is better. You make more money as a housepainter. Ten dollars an hour.
O’BRIEN: Who do you think is the world’s greatest living artist?
WARHOL: I still think Walt Disney is.
O’BRIEN: He’s dead.
WARHOL: I know, but they still have him in plastic, don’t they?
O’BRIEN: He’s frozen.
WARHOL: But I really like them all. Rauschenberg and Twombly and Paul Klee. Dead ones too? And I like American primitive painters. I just like everyone, every group. Grant Wood, Ray Johnson.
O’BRIEN: Who is the richest artist in the world?
WARHOL: I’ll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.
O’BRIEN: What about Dalf?
WARHOL: I don’t think getting your name around means that you make a lot of money.
O’BRIEN: Do you think you or Dalf is more famous?
WARHOL: There’s Calder too. Miro is still alive.
O’BRIEN: Have you made a million on art?
WARHOL: It depends on the expenses.
O’BRIEN: Has your work gone up in price a lot compared to what you made on it originally?
WARHOL: No, I try to keep it down. I turn out so much. But I stopped for a while.
O’BRIEN: To raise the prices?
WARHOL: No, I just can’t think of anything to do. I get so tired of painting. I’ve been trying to give it up all the time, if we could just make a living out of movies or the newspaper business or something. It’s so boring, painting the same picture over and over.
O’BRIEN: Where do you get your ideas for paintings these days?
WARHOL: I do mostly portraits. So it’s just people’s faces, not really any ideas.
O’BRIEN: But lately you’ve done flowers and skulls.
WARHOL: We’ve been in Italy so much, and everybody’s always asking me if I’m a Communist because I’ve done Mao. So now I’m doing hammers and sickles for Communism, and skulls for Fascism.
O’BRIEN: Did Mao ever see your portrait of him?
WARHOL: I don’t know. One of the big ones was shown in Washington at the Corcoran Gallery, and the director there told us that a delegation of Chinese was taking a tour of the place. They found out there was a big Mao hanging there, so they went in through the back of the museum so they wouldn’t see Mao. I guess they were worried about liking it or not liking it. It’s all so different for them. We invited the Chinese ambassador to the Factory, but he never came.
O’BRIEN: Who do you think is the best business artist in the world?
WARHOL: Cristo. He just finished this $2 million project for a foundation. But I’m sure the government’s going to find something wrong with the foundation. It seems so easy. That’s more like a business. It’s like producing something, a big $2-million project. Someone will come along and do a movie like that, a $4-million art movie nobody has to really like.
O’BRIEN: But Cristo makes money.
WARHOL: No, he works on a foundation thing. You don’t get paid, you just take out expenses and things.
O’BRIEN: Do you think that’s what’s going to happen to art? It’s going to be all foundations and subsidies?
WARHOL: Yeah, that sounds like a nice new way. It’s the easiest thing. There are a lot of people working on it; and it’s up for only two weeks.
O’BRIEN: Do, you think Picasso was a business artist?
WARHOL: Yeah, I guess so. He knew what he was doing.
O’BRIEN: But who do you think invented the idea?
WARHOL: I think Americans after the war. It was the galleries. Somewhere along the line, someone did it with Picasso, where it started to be more of a product.
O’BRIEN: Do you think Picasso was conscious of his prices and his marketing?
WARHOL: Oh, yeah.
O’BRIEN: Do you think artists of the future will form companies or go public and sell stock?
WARHOL: No, but I’m opening a restaurant called the Andymat. We’re going to sell turkeys. But I can’t use that word any more.
O’BRIEN: Why?
WARHOL: Well, I like them. But whenever I call something that, people think I’m putting it down.
O’BRIEN: Do you think that there are any art movements now?
WARHOL: No.
O’BRIEN: Do you think there will ever be any more art movements?
WARHOL: Oh, yeah. I always thought they were going to come from California. But I just came back from Macon, Georgia, and I was surprised. They have so many performers down there. It’s such a wonderful town. You can see why they have so many famous performers.
O’BRIEN: Do you think social realism is business art?
WARHOL: What kind is that?
O’BRIEN: You know, Diego Rivera, post-office murals, WPA art.
WARHOL: Yeah, they should really do more with it. It’s amazing that they don’t do enough with it. You never see anybody painting up offices. You know who has a wonderful dining room? Bill Copley got all those kids who graffiti the subway, and he hired four of them to do his dining room. It’s really wonderful.
O’BRIEN: Do you think those kids should get grants to decorate subways?
WARHOL: Yeah. But when you go to Tehran the graffiti is so beautiful. It’s not so beautiful here. Their writing is much more beautiful than ours. All the writing is great, even the signs.
O’BRIEN: You once said that your work was decorative. Do you still think that?
WARHOL: Oh, yeah. But Emile de Antonio thinks it’s Marxist. It’s really funny.
O’BRIEN: Did you ever read Marx?
WARHOL: Marx who? The only Marx I knew was the toy company.