Love Me Tender

Warhol goes to the Mardi Gras

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

Andy Warhol’s drawings of shoes featured in advertisements in The New York Times for a decade before he made his famous Pop images. Adman: Warhol before Pop at the Art Gallery of New South Wales showcased the pre-Pop commercial art of Warhol.

This show was an unexpected hit; vivacious, compendious and different. It included private drawings of penises with Tiffany bows alongside butterflies and valentines from Warhol’s hand-drawn advertisements and designs for shop windows. Who knew there was so much Warhol before there was Pop?

The promotion for the show included a float in Sydney’s Mardi Gras parade featuring a giant shoe. Partnering with the Mardi Gras could be seen as a marketing coup by the gallery, who promoted the show as Warhol’s queering of art. But it also foregrounds the way Warhol’s later work marked the terms on which marketing captured art.

Warhol was careful to build his brand; from his early days as an illustrator for Madison Avenue, he created the dishevelled boyish image of Raggedy Andy, being sure to mess up his clothes, which nevertheless were bought from upscale Brooks Brothers. He well understood the love of brands, and their role as totems in the modern mythology of American consumer life in the mid-twentieth century.

Tattooed Woman Holding Rose (1955), a drawing done to publicise his availability as an illustrator and including his name and phone number, shows a circus girl tattooed all over with brand names like GE and Kellogg’s. It echoed a portrait by photographer George Platt Lynes and projected the same camp sensibility, but added to this the proposal that the brand was something to love.

As he made his reputation, Warhol began signing... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Andy Warhol and Julia Warhola (lettering), In the Bottom of My Garden, 1958. Offset lithograph and Dr. Martin’s Aniline dye on paper with buckram board cover, overall: 21.9 x 28.6 x 1cm, overall (book open):
21.9 x 56.5cm. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/ARS.

Tattooed Woman Holding Rose, c1955. Offset lithography on onion skin paper, 73.7 x 27.9cm. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/ARS.