"I want to be as famous as the Queen of England," Warhol comments. This seemingly banal phrase could be loaded with meaning. He doesn't want to be the President of the United States, nor a millionaire, nor a star: he aspires to be the Queen of England. In short, he wants a past not only with a will, but with a notarized will. He doesn't want to be just famous or rich: he aspires to create a past steeped in the past—which he reproduces in his home—and he also wants to be English, conforming to the quintessential myth of glamour in America.
Who was Andy Warhol, really? Was he the most famous exponent of pop culture, someone fascinated by advertising and success—the quintessential American—a compulsive shopper and consumer, a multifaceted and admired artist? Or was he perhaps the last great painter of the European tradition of portraiture and still life; a man consumed by what he owned, melancholic, nostalgic, who lived life as a race toward death?
In the "Arguments" collection, we're revisiting "Very Sad Warhol ," a highly unusual essay that answers these questions in the form of a story that begins one day in August 1956, when the late Romantic painter, Jackson Pollock, crashed his car on Long Island. Artists such as David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and Tom Wesselmann appear and disappear in this story, and around them, a whole series of concepts of modernity, current syndromes of our time, are also formed: nostalgia, melancholy, and death.
Warhol's Triste ends with the artist's death. But more than a book about him or Pop Art, this is a daring and revealing story that speaks to all of us, ultimately trapped in these modern syndromes.
