Nina Schleif has written a book on Andy Warhol’s early years entitled Andy Warhol. Drag & Draw: The Unknown Fifties (Hardcover, Hirmer, 2018, 144 pages with 142 color illustrations, 24 x 29 cm). Order the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr or Amazon.de.
In a 1966 interview with the American Cavalier magazine, Andy Warhol famously replied to the Cavalier question: “When did you start painting?” AW: “About four or five years ago.” Cavalier: “What about the time prior to that?” AW: “Before that time I was very young.”
Nina Schleif mentions that in 1966, contrary to his claim, Andy Warhol had already been painting for nearly 15 years. However, he was correct in the sense that, the oeuvre of his early years is dominated by drawings. They made him a successful advertising artist, but they would not bring about his breakthrough as a master of fine arts.
His commissioned works from the Fifties received more attention since 1971 when they were first shown in an exhibition. However, his private drawings remain one of the least known bodies of his work. With her book Andy Warhol. Drag & Draw: The Unknown Fifties, Nina Schleif intends to shed light on those largely forgotten works.
Nina Schleif focuses on two noteworthy series’ of drawings which, so far, have largely been considered unappealing, impermeable, or simply irrelevant to art history.
She considers “Ladies’ Alphabet” (1953), which remained unpublished during Warhol’s lifetime, one of his most astonishing early works, together with the “Drag Series” (1953).
According to Nina Schleif, “Ladies’ Alphabet” was initially conceived as a fun and campy book. It evolved into a sophisticated and conceptually complex, standards setting work that served Andy Warhol as source material throughout the 1950s. The artist’s drawings of striking women (famous actresses and men in drag) were coupled with Ralph Ward’s rhymes about female fashion accessories.
Drag was just one among various motifs in “Ladies’ Alphabet”. It became the focal point of the “Drag series”. At the beginning of the decade, Andy Warhol had met the photographer Otto Fenn. He enjoyed hosting parties that included drag as well as staging private drag photo sessions. They inspired Warhol to conceive a thematically coherent group of drawings. Nina Schleif dedicates chapter two of her book to the social and artistic circumstances of the secret photo sessions and the private gay parties which took place in New York in the prudish 1950s.
According to Nina Schleif, Andy Warhol made a distinction not in terms of value judgment but of audience between different bodies of work: The promotional books conceived from 1952 onwards belonged to the semiprivate works that the artist used for personal and professional self-marketing purposes. In addition, they were also attemps to enter the children’s book market. The were more ambitious and conceptually more complex than his advertising works. From the 1950s onwards Warhol created those works which he created for his own pleasure or to be shown in art galleries. Nina Schleif calls them art or private drawings.
The best-known and most researched body of Andy Warhol’s 1950s drawings are his commissioned works which he created after graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology in his native Pittsburgh and moving to New York. His commerical drawings of fashion accessories, animals, flowers and figures conformed to the taste of the times. Probably because they were accessible early on, they misleadingly came to represent the artist’s entire drawing oeuvre of the 1950s.
The largely unknown early, semiprivate and artistic work offers more wit, humor and erotic daring than the commissioned work. In her present book, Nina Schleif selected one exemplary series each from the semiprivate work “Ladies’ Alphabet” and from the art drawings the “Drag Series” and reconstructed as much of their history as is accessible now.
The majority of Warhol’s drawings in the 1950s were based on photographs. The artist not only recognized photography as a practical facilitator. In addition, Nina Schleif argues that photography ensured a coherent iconography within groups of drawings; it provided a stringent formal thread and shaped the aesthetic of the different groups—all of this without revealing that photography was the stimulus behind these drawings. They may be read as Warhol’s early meditations on the relation of the medium and style. Nina Schleif adds that they open a window onto his creative practice.
This new book offers many more insights, including photographs by and a biography of Otto Fenn.
Nina Schleif: Andy Warhol. Drag & Draw: The Unknown Fifties (Hardcover, Hirmer, 2018, 144 pages with 142 color illustrations, 24 x 29 cm). Order the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr or Amazon.de.
The book by Nina Schleif is the source for this book review. To make the text easier to read, quotations and semi-quotations have not been put between quotation marks.
