Carnegie Museum of Art Carnegie Museum of Art Andy Warhol Elemetary

Book ExcerptLessons Learned in Pittsburgh

Duane Michals, Andy Warhol (c. 1974). Courtesy Duane Michals and DC Moore Gallery, New York, © 2018 Duane Michals.

Twenty minutes upwardly from the Warholas' firm, the Carnegie Constitute was an inescapable landmark of downtown Oakland. Its grand concert hall, museums and library (a special favorite of Warhol's) filled an imposing Beaux Arts edifice that had the names of the West's cultural heroes carved into its façade. A painter such as Leonardo got to shoulder upwards confronting other titans like Goethe and Beethoven—all 3 condign subjects of Warhol'due south afterward fine art. Given the small culture of the Warhola home, the immersion Warhol would have needed in the linguistic communication of art could only have begun in that building. Without knowing what artists and audiences had seen and appreciated and counted as fine art in the past, Warhol could never have carried his culture'southward art forward.

Crossing the Carnegie'southward soaring atrium on the way to the new art classes this school kid had signed upwardly for—there are photos of pupils making that trip—Warhol was treated to a deluxe suite of murals that began with a hellish view of the city's mills, depicted from precisely the smoke-choked hills of Soho where Warhol was born. As he and his classmates climbed the stairs, the smoke was shown giving way before the Angels of Art anointing an ascendant figure of Labor—Andrew Carnegie himself, costumed every bit a knight. This was an allegory of cultural and social ascent that Warhol seems to have taken to middle.

The kids in the museum's art classes were known as Tam o'Shanters, apparently a Scottified, Carnegie'd reference to the classic Montmartre artist's beret. The world-famous program was just a few years onetime when Warhol joined. The most notable of the program's teachers was a certain Joseph Fitzpatrick, who happened to be a Warhola neighbor in tidy South Oakland. A slim, tall human who taught in a natty arrange and tie, he was barely in his thirties when Warhol knew him. He'd spent a few years every bit art supervisor for the public school system, which had a notably aggressive cultural agenda for its students, and then taught at Warhol'southward ain Schenley High in Oakland. Fitzpatrick was famously strict, and his lessons might seem a bear upon Victorian: as many as half dozen hundred children sitting in the Institute's chiliad Music Hall—" the largest art grade in the world"—all in ties and tidy dresses and all drawing pictures of the aforementioned thing. Merely Fitzpatrick likewise voiced more modern attitudes: "I looked for the boys and girls to express themselves in their own ways. In other words, I didn't say that a cartoon had to be this way, or that way . . . just I did say it had to be excellent."

Members of the Tam O'Shanter Fine art Grade for Children, Hall of Architecture, 1932. Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art

Another Carnegie teacher wanted his students "to learn to meet beautifully." He played Debussy on the pianoforte while the piffling Tam o'Shanters drew "forms that sprang into life from hearing the inspiring notes." Sometimes that teacher made his own abstractions as the little ones sang.

Fitzpatrick and his colleagues had their charges "all on fire . . . most art, as an idea" according to one Tam o'Shanter friend of Warhol's. Warhol prospered, winning accolade afterward accolade for "very realistic work . . . with a decorative quality that was very becoming," recalled Fitzpatrick, more than a half century after Warhol was supposed to have made that impression. "I distinctly remember how individual his way was. . . . From the very get-go he was quite original." Yet in 1939, the Carnegie art classes had almost twenty-v thousand names on their attendance sheets, with several kids nominated from every public and private school, and so it would be a mistake to dwell also much on young Warhol as function of some budding creative elite. Even his brother John had enough artistic talent to kickoff classes there at the same fourth dimension as Warhol, but quit considering he didn't accept his sibling's willingness to miss out on playing ball with the neighborhood boys. A statement past the Carnegie might as well take had Warhol in mind: "Nosotros are looking forward to a time when we shall search out and find the potential artist. We shall nurture him, like the queen bee, on special creative nutrient. . . . [s]o that a leader in this field shall not exist lost."

If the lessons were important for Warhol'south futurity, their setting may accept mattered fifty-fifty more than. The Carnegie art students sketched and eventually made watercolors right inside the museum's Erstwhile Globe galleries, where Warhol got the chance to know the museum's permanent collection. In those early on days, there weren't many masterpieces on view—Andrew Carnegie had wanted his museum to focus on recent art of a bourgeois aptitude—but its decent holdings in Old Master portraits set up Warhol up for his career as the greatest portraitist of his era.

The shortcomings in the Carnegie's permanent collection were made up for past an aggressive roster of special exhibitions, which would have fleshed out the thorough grounding in fine art history Warhol had got from Miss Vickermann at his uncomplicated schoolhouse. Looking at the exhibition program from Warhol'south time equally a student at the Carnegie museum is like looking at a prehistory of his career. When he was almost twelve, the museum brought in a bear witness of European "masterpieces," which gave Warhol his showtime taste of classic works past the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens and Poussin, setting the bar high for his afterwards ambitions.

Joseph Fitzpatrick, Andy Warhol's babyhood fine art teacher, at home. Photo via Pittsburgh Printing

In 1941 there was a blockbuster Picasso show, on tour from the Museum of Modern Art, which included Guernica, the era's glory painting. It let the immature Warhol take the measure of his virtually important twentieth-century rival, who was a special favorite of his in college. Later, at the tiptop of his Popular Art fame, Warhol made the rivalry explicit by wearing the striped T-shirts Picasso was famous for.

A silkscreen exhibition gave him early exposure to his signature Pop medium. Surveys of the French outsider Henri Rousseau and of American "primitives" sparked his lifelong interest in outsider and folk art, which was a vital model for his piece of work in the 1950s and which he nerveless all his life. As late as 1976, Warhol was still including "American primitive painters" on his listing of all-time favorite artists. When a Pittsburgh newspaper raved about the Carnegie'southward "magnificent" survey of Rousseau, it described him as an creative person who "paints a child's earth in adult terms. . . . Nosotros suspect many mod artists of also going back to their childhood, only their excursions lack the unforced directness [of] Rousseau." A adept part of the entreatment of Warhol's 1950s illustrations came from their simulation, at least, of a childlike directness.

A Carnegie survey of contemporary self-portraits launched Warhol into depicting himself, which he started early and never abased. Other Carnegie exhibitions—The Creative person as Reporter, The American Weekly Showroom of Magazine Art, annual photo shows, a landmark survey of Russian icons—seem tailor-fabricated to turn Warhol into the particular artist he became. In April 1940, the Carnegie published a photo of a crowd of its art students. I of them is a scrawny swain whose shock of blond hair bears a suspicious resemblance to the hairstyle of a certain preteen named Andrew Warhola. Whether that's him in the shot or not, what really matters is what those Saturday pupils are doing: They are hard at piece of work sketching the piles of advanced contemporary art that the museum brought in once a year for its famous Carnegie International.

Homer Saint-Gaudens (left) with unidentified man, 1934. Carnegie Institute, Museum of Fine art records, 1883-1962. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Establishment.

Every Oct since 1896 the museum had hosted that show, the land'due south only survey of the latest in world fine art, rivaled only by the Venice Biennale in scale and importance. During Warhol'due south early Pittsburgh years, information technology was organized by a man named Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of the celebrated sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Homer was brought up among America's starting time modern artists—John Vocalizer Sargent painted him at age x—simply he was also a toff who captained the Harvard fencing team. In Paris or New York, his tastes might take seemed a bit tame, but he claimed his Internationals had been wild enough to blow upwardly Pittsburgh's "self-contented ignorance." The local press agreed with him, and didn't like it. One newspaper gave front-page play to a New York critic's reactionary attack on the first prize that the International's "stupid" jury awarded to a quite demure Picasso portrait.

Of form, controversy had its benefits (some other of import lesson for Warhol): Crowds thronged to one International that included a controversial first-prize painting titled Suicide in Costume. Its artist said that his grotesque dead clown symbolized "our civilization." The painting was the talk of Pittsburgh for decades. But past 1950, a year subsequently Warhol left the city, Saint-Gaudens could claim that he'd won the fight for Pittsburghers' hearts: "They used to spit at fifty yards at a modernistic painting; at present they say, 'I don't know anything about it—it may be all correct.' "

On top of educational activity Warhol that bankroll the advanced paid cultural and social dividends, the Carnegie International nether Saint-Gaudens promoted an advanced view of art as involved in the earth around it. It regularly showcased works near the horrors of industry and Jim Crow, sometimes even including black artists in its mix. Art, wrote Saint-Gaudens, "must justify itself; must be measured past its effects on the social orders." Warhol took that lesson to center. His mature piece of work certainly did have—was intended to have—such an effect, at a fourth dimension when many other artists were decorated exploring and expressing their interior lives. The first-prize picture at the Carnegie'south 1941 exhibition depicted lynchings and other troubles of the American S; information technology might also accept been one of Warhol's highly charged Death and Disaster pictures, in embryo, with their depictions of police attacking blackness marchers and electric chairs pending their adjacent victims.

In 1940, with war raging in Europe, the almanac show got cut back to artists in the U.S.A., including émigré art stars such as Max Ernst and George Grosz and major American figures such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Milton Avery, and Edward Hopper. It's specially nice to know that the young Warhol had a chance almost every year to see some notable painting by Stuart Davis, the one true avatar of Pop Art in this before generation. Davis'southward pictures of store signs and cigarette packs, done in the bold, brilliant styles of package design, set an example for Warhol of how it was possible to make world-class pictures that riffed on pop civilization. Davis's influence was acknowledged decades afterwards by Henry Geldzahler, the powerful curator who "discovered" Warhol and Pop Art.

Every bit a Pittsburgh teenager Warhol had no way of knowing that by scanting brainchild, the Carnegie's annual was missing out on the sharpest cut edge. The Warholas shared Pittsburgh'south general skepticism about abstract art, and that may have been at the root of Warhol'south later trend to encounter abstraction as a desirably daring grade he didn't quite accept access to.

"American art, now in the procedure of creation, belongs to the future . . . a fresh, vigorous cosmos of a new form speedily approaching maturity, perhaps its Golden Age," proclaimed Warhol'southward college art text, written while Warhol was still in elementary school. That important—but in fact incorrect—thought that American English was the normal language of the advanced would already have been planted in the young Warhol past the Carnegie's wartime annuals. In the 1930s, when those lines in the textbook were written, they represented wishful thinking, but their ideas withal set up a target for Warhol's ambitions. A truly American creativity, his textbook informed him, would someday "transcend the incomplete experiments of the early twentieth century and so that a universal art and a more comprehensive meaning may be created for mankind's future." Warhol gave himself a role in edifice such a futurity.

Excerpted from Warhol, published by Ecco.

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Source: https://www.warhol.org/lessons-learned-in-pittsburgh/

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