POPism (2 page)

Ivan was surprised that I hadn't heard of Lichtenstein. But he wasn't as surprised as I was, finding out that someone else was working with cartoon and commercial subjects, too!

I had a very good rapport with Ivan right away. He was young, he had an “up” attitude to everything. He was sort of dancing around to the music.

For the first fifteen minutes or so, he looked through my stuff tentatively. Then he dug in and began to sort it out. “These blunt, straightforward works are the only ones of any consequence. The others are all homage to Abstract Expressionism and are not.” He laughed and said, “Am I being arrogant?” We talked for a long time about this new subject matter of mine and he said he had intimations that something shocking was about to happen with it. I felt very good. Ivan had a way of making you feel good, so after he left, I sat down and wrapped the Little Nancy cartoon painting that he said was his favorite and sent it over to him at the gallery with a red bow on it.

The next day he brought by some people who had been receptive to Lichtenstein's things in the back room at Castelli's. (Castelli wasn't officially showing Lichtenstein yet—it was an informal sort of thing.)

A few months later I asked Ivan how he'd come to have those first paintings of Roy's in the gallery. He said that one day he was in the gallery lecturing to some college students on how you evaluate new artists' works (how you decide whether or not you want to show tliem), when a nervous-looking young guy appeared in the doorway with his paintings—he was too shy to come in when he saw all the students there. Ivan had had to look at his paintings in the hallway. The students were naturally eager to see a real-life demonstration of what Ivan had just been explaining to them, and they naturally expected Ivan to be his usual confident, unflappable self. But when he took a look at Lichtenstein's work, he got confused—they were “peculiar and aggressive,” very remote from anything he'd seen before, and he told Roy that he'd like to keep two paintings in back room racks to show to Leo Castelli.

Ivan, I found out, had started working for Castelli in '59. “I was working with Martha Jackson then,” he told me, “and
Michael Sonnabend came to me one day and said, ‘Ivan, you're much too good for this, come have lunch with me and some friends.' I said, ‘I'll do anything for lunch.' And it was the Carlyle, which I'd never been to, with very thick tablecloths and napkins, and standoffish, slightly disdainful waiters, and I'll do anything for a lunch like that, so I went to work for Leo Castelli, who was then still married to Ileana. [She later became Ileana Sonnabend.] With my first paycheck, I bought a new suit.”

Leo had an art history background and a very good visual sense, but it was Ivan who got him to be adventurous, to poke around new artists' studios. Ivan was young and open to new possibilities; he wasn't locked into any strict art philosophy.

Ivan managed to be “light” without being frivolous. And he was so good with words. His whole manner was like a witty aside, and people loved it. His loose, personal style of art dealing went perfectly with the Pop Art style. Years later I figured out why he was such a successful art dealer—this may sound strange, but I believe it was because art was his second love. He seemed to love literature more, and he put the serious side of his nature into that. During the sixties he wrote
five novels
—that's a lot of writing. Some people are even better at their second love than their first, maybe because when they care too much, it freezes them, but knowing there's something they'd rather be doing gives them a certain freedom. Anyway, that's my theory about Ivan's success.

In the late post–Abstract Expressionist days, the days right before Pop, there were only a few people in the art world who knew who was good, and the people who were good knew who else was good. It was all like private information; the art public hadn't picked up on it yet. One incident especially brought home to me how low the general art world awareness was.

De had met Frank Stella when Frank was an undergraduate at Princeton, and they had stayed good friends. (De reminded me that he'd once brought Frank to my house and I'd pointed at a small painting of his that he had with him and said, “I'll take six of those.” I don't remember that, but it must have happened, because I do have six of that painting.) One of Frank's black paintings hung in De's apartment on East 92nd Street. Around the corner from De lived a famous psychiatrist couple who I'll call Hildegarde and Irwin. They were what's known as straight eclectic Freudians. I tagged along with De to a few parties that they gave, and those parties were just remarkable: the guests who weren't psychiatrists were all black people from the UN or UNESCO—“all do-gooding groups,” as De put it. He used to laugh and swear that over the years, at all of their parties combined, “I've met exactly
one
attractive woman; they're a terrible-looking group of people.”

One afternoon I decided to stop by De's, and just as I got to the door, he was opening it and telling Hildegarde and another woman, a friend of hers who lived down the street, “Get out! I never want to see you again!” I couldn't figure out what was going on, because he and Hildegarde were very good friends, so I just walked on into the apartment as they walked on out. It was a beautiful snowy day; the windows were open and the snow was blowing in.

De explained to me that it had all started with Hildegarde pointing over at the Stella on the wall and sneering, “What's that?” De had told her, “It's a painting by a friend of mine.” She and her friend had burst out laughing. “A
painting???”
Then Hildegarde had walked over and lifted it off the wall and poured a bottle of whiskey on it. Then she'd picked up some ether they sniff in the streets during Carnival in Brazil that she'd just brought
back from there for De and she sprayed it all over the painting. The Stella was wiped out. De kept saying to me, but it was really to himself, “What can you do? You can't hit a woman…”

As De finished telling me the story, I suddenly saw the ruined Stella lying in a corner. I didn't know what to say. I just sat there with my galoshes dripping a puddle on the floor. The phone rang and, coincidentally, it was Frank. De told him the whole story. I couldn't believe it when I heard De say that the woman with Hildegarde was actually married to a sculptor—I mean, it wasn't like some cleaning lady had seen an all-black painting and tried to scrub it clean with steel wool! De hung up the phone and said that Frank had promised to make him another one “just like it,” but he wasn't consoled, he knew that it's not possible to make two paintings exactly alike.

Then the doorbell rang and it was Irwin, sheepishly holding a Motherwell. He said, “Can we give you this, and some money?” De told him to get the fuck out.

One evening De and I were having dinner at “21.” I was always sort of starry-eyed, I guess, asking him about the artists he knew, and this night he was describing for me “the greatest art exhibit” he'd ever been to. In the mid-fifties, Jasper Johns had called De up and very formally invited him to dinner “a week from Wednesday.” De and his wife at the time—I think it was his third—were on the kind of terms with Jasper where they'd call each other up and say what're you doing tonight? so this “week from Wednesday” business was unusual, the kind of formal thing they never did. (“Jasper was reserved,” De said, “but he wasn't
that
reserved!”) When the day came, De and his wife went down to the building on Pearl Street where Jasper and Bob Rauschenberg lived. In those days Pearl Street was so beautiful and narrow
that if there was a car parked on it you couldn't get by. Jasper's loft usually had paint and materials strewn all over, De said, because he worked there, too, but this particular Wednesday it was immaculate, there wasn't a sign of his everyday life visible, except that on the walls were
all
his early paintings—the big American Flag, the first Targets, the first Numbers. (For me, just thinking about what that must have been like was thrilling.) “I was knocked out,” De said. “You feel something like that with your insides; the words for it come later—
dryness, austerity
… And to think there were people who'd seen those pictures when they were first painted and had laughed, just like they'd laughed at Rauschenberg!”

I've often wondered why people who could look at incredible new art and
laugh
at it bothered to involve themselves with art at all. And yet you'd run into so many of these types around the art scene.

De always said that the hardest thing was to have a friend who was an artist whose work you just couldn't respect: “You have to stop being friends with them, because it's too hard to look at their work and think, ‘yuk.'” So everyone that De was friends with he respected. At a party of his once, I heard him answer the phone and tell someone, “Yes, I
do
mind, because I don't like his politics.” Someone had wanted to bring Adlai Stevenson.

As we sat at “21” (I remember I had the
National Enquirer
in my lap—I was fascinated by all the Thalidomide stories) we talked about the art around town—about Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine's street exhibit at the Judson Gallery, about Oldenburg's beach collages in a group show at the Martha Jackson, about Tom Wesselmann's first exhibit of the Great American
Nude series at the Tanager Gallery—but my mind kept going back to what De had just told me about that exhibition that Jasper had made for himself in his own loft. De was such good friends with both Jasper and Bob that I figured he could probably tell me something I'd been wanting to know for a long time: why didn't they like me? Every time I saw them, they cut me dead. So when the waiter brought the brandy, I finally popped the question, and De said, “Okay, Andy, if you really want to hear it straight, I'll lay it out for you. You're too swish, and that upsets them.”

I was embarrassed, but De didn't stop. I'm sure he saw that my feelings were hurt, but I'd asked him a question and he was going to let me have the whole answer. “First, the post–Abstract Expressionist sensibility is, of course, a homosexual one, but these two guys wear three-button suits—they were in the army or navy or something! Second, you make them nervous because you
collect
paintings, and traditionally artists don't buy the work of other artists, it just isn't done. And third,” De concluded, “you're a commercial artist, which really bugs them because when
they
do commercial art—windows and other jobs I find them—they do it just ‘to survive.' They won't even use their real names. Whereas
you've
won
prizes!
You're
famous
for it!”

It was perfectly true, what De said. I was well known as a commercial artist. I got a real kick out of seeing my name listed under “Fashion” in a novelty book called
A Thousand New York Names and Where to Drop Them
. But if you wanted to be considered a “serious” artist, you weren't supposed to have anything to do with commercial art. De was the only person I knew then who could see past those old social distinctions to the art itself.

• • •

What De had just told me hurt a lot. When I'd asked him, “Why don't they like me?” I'd naturally hoped to get off easier than this. When you ask a question like that, you always hope the person will convince you that you're just paranoid. I didn't know what to say. Finally I just said something stupid: “I know plenty of painters who are more swish than me.” And De said, “Yes, Andy, there are others who are more swish—and less talented—and still others who are less swish and just as talented, but the
major painters
try to look straight; you play up the swish—it's like an armor with you.”

There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I
should
want to change. There was nothing wrong with being a commercial artist and there was nothing wrong with collecting art that you admired. Other people could change their attitudes, but not me—I knew I was right. And as for the “swish” thing, I'd always had a lot of fun with that—just watching the expressions on people's faces. You'd have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish. I certainly wasn't a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme.

The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar on University Place were all hard-driving, two-fisted types who'd grab each other and say things like “I'll knock your fucking teeth out” and “I'll steal your girl.” In a way, Jackson Pollock had to die the way
he did, crashing his car up, and even Barnett Newman, who was so elegant, always in a suit and monocle, was tough enough to get into politics when he made a kind of symbolic run for mayor of New York in the thirties. The toughness was part of a tradition, it went with their agonized, anguished art. They were always exploding and having fist fights about their work and their love lives. This went on all through the fifties when I was just new in town, doing whatever jobs I could get in advertising and spending my nights at home drawing to meet deadlines or going out with a few friends.

I often asked Larry Rivers, after we got to be friends, what it had really been like down there then. Larry's painting style was unique—it wasn't Abstract Expressionist and it wasn't Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop—he rode around on a motorcycle and he had a sense of humor about himself as well as everybody else. I used to see him mostly at parties. I remember a very crowded opening at the Janis Gallery where we stood wedged in a corner at right angles to each other and I got Larry talking about the Cedar. I'd heard that when he was about to go on “The $64,000 Question” on TV, he passed the word around that if he won, you could find him at the Cedar bar, and if he lost, he'd head straight for the Five-Spot, where he played jazz saxophone. He did win—$49,000—and he went straight to the Cedar and bought drinks for around three hundred people.