“Except Like a Tracing”: Defectiveness, Accuracy, and Class in Early Warhol

Abstract

OCTOBER 140, Spring 2012, pp. 139–164. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Andy Warhol’s most astute interpreters have frequently been forced to acknowledge that class plays a key role in his work, and that its manifestations may be stylistic as well as iconographic, but they have typically had a difficult time describing its specific power in any detail. In his review of Warhol’s 1962 show at the Stable Gallery, Michael Fried bemoaned “the advent of a generation that will not be as moved by Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heart-breaking icons of Marilyn Monroe as I am” and remarked that “Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct for vulgarity (as in his choice of colors) and a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths of our time that I for one find moving . . . ”2 The essay is only a few hundred words long, and the repeated references to vulgarity are therefore all the more striking. Vulgarity, as T. J. Clark has convincingly shown, is fundamentally a class-based pejorative: a “betrayal, on the part of those who by rights ought to be in the vanguard of good taste.”3 What Fried immediately sees in Warhol is a breach of bourgeois taste that is somehow successfully counterbalanced by the force of Warhol’s aesthetic proficiency.4