Warhol Had No Faith in Europe

Intellectual respect for Andy Warhol manifested itself in Europe long before it did in the United States. The problem for Europeans, in contrast to Americans, was to believe that Warhol’s work was critical of capitalism. This was a serious act of self-deception: His work never expressed European views. More than any other pop artist, he was a decisive defender of Americanism and consumerism.

In the idealistic Europe of the ’60s, some would have sold their souls to the devil for Warhol to be communist. Especially in France and Italy, this would have been very welcome, and indeed there were some illusory moments when people came to believe it. A sad misperception: Not only does Warhol’s art embody the American lifestyle, but it was also “patriotic and laudatory” to the maximum, according to the excellent book “Andy Warhol” by philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto (born in Michigan in 1924), which he dedicated to “Barack and Michelle Obama, and the future of American art.” Can you imagine any of our respected art critics dedicating a book to Artur Mas, Helena Rakosnik and the future of Catalan art? I personally cannot.

There is a difference between what we would like something to be and what it really is. Obsessed with glamor, beauty, parties, shopping and sex, the truth is that Warhol was not very interested in talking about politics, although his weakness for the Democratic Party, which he ended up financing, is well known. Warhol did not like “getting involved” with politics, and in fact nobody in the United States ever forgave him for not taking a stance on Vietnam.

In his book, Danto — who, as we have established by the conclusive dedication, is also a great American patriot — acknowledges that Andy Warhol was more successful in Europe because left-wing Europeans saw much political meaning in his work. Meaning that they invented.

Had Warhol played a part in this game of confusion, things would be different. A second recent volume, “Andy Warhol: Entrevistas” (Blackie Books)*, makes it very clear that this was not the case. In an interview with the poet John Giorno, in 1963, Warhol announced that he would exhibit his series about disasters at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery in Paris: “I do not know why I have an exhibit in Paris. I do not believe in Europe.**”

In 1966, in a famous interview with Gretchen Berg, daughter of film historian Herman G. Weinberg, Andy Warhol revealed: “I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think it’s so great. It’s fantastic. I’d like to work in Europe but I wouldn’t do the same things, I’d do different things. I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I’m not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best.” Enough said.

*Editor’s Note: Blackie Books of Barcelona published this translation in October 2010, from the English-language original “I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987,” published in 2004.

**Editor’s Note: Unable to verify this quote from the original.