Bukowskis | Contemporary | November 11, 2015 by Bukowskis

Bobby Short

Andy Warhol: Bobby Short

Bobby Short through the eyes of Andy Warhol For Sweden in general, and for Stockholm in particular, Andy Warhol (1928—2005) constitutes an important part of our cultural history. In February 1968, Warhol’s fluorescent wall paper with cows was mounted on the facade of the Moderna Museet, its bright colours reflected in the waters of the city. This event marks a point, or rather highlight, when the art world in Sweden became connected to the ever more globalised world of international contemporary art. Warhol created a riddle so fascinating, that its strength can be compared with the sensation of infinity experienced in a hall of mirrors. It is in some ways characteristic that the space exploration of the 1960’s coincided with Warhol’s almost ritualistic research into the fleeting nature of man’s existence. Both these phenomena, the artist and cosmos, have yet to have their riddles unlocked. Bobby Short (1924—2005) was a beloved interpreter of the 20th century’s legendary music and a well-respected connoisseur of the magic of jazz music. In 1963 he was not yet 40 years old, but already collaborating with Atlantic Records. As a musician he was used to being in the spotlight, but Warhol must have recognized something special in him. In comparison with other and more famous portraits that Warhol executed in the 1960’s: Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Ethel Scull, among others, the works depicting Bobby Short show a particularly strong sense of spontaneity and directness. Bobby Short conveys an innate joie de vivre and through this series of intimate portraits, Warhol has given the beloved musician eternal life. We are very proud to present these important works by Andy Warhol in our Contemporary Sale. Anna Persson Head of Art Department

ÂťBobby Short epitomized sophistication and grace. He brought rare intelligence, real feeling, and deep understanding to every lyric he sang and every melody he played. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and popular music, and he was quite literally a living songbook.ÂŤ Ahmet Ertegun Founding Chairman, Atlantic Records

Andy Warhol (USA 1928—1987), Three paintings depicting Bobby Short Estimate: SEK 7 000 000—8 000 000 Included as one lot in the Contemporary & Design sale on 11 November 2015

Andy Warhol, Bobby Short (cerulean blue) Executed in October—November 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 50.5 × 40.5 cm. Provenance:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York. Lang Fine Art and Jane Holzer. Private collection, Sweden. Exhibitions:

Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, »Andy Warhol, Portraits«, 5 December 2005—10 January 2006. Literature:

Georg Frei and Neil Printz (Editors), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings and Sculpture 1961—1963, Vol. 1, 2002/2012, illustrated in colour, p. 424 and listed on p. 425, no. 484. Andy Warhol »Giant Size« (Edited by Phaidon), 2006, illustrated in colour p. 262. Andy Warhol Portraits (Edited by Tony Shafrazi), 2007/2010, illustrated in colour p. 38. PA 55.026.

Andy Warhol, Bobby Short (cerulean blue) Executed in October—November 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 51 × 40.5 cm. Provenance:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York. Lang Fine Art and Jane Holzer. Private collection, Sweden. Exhibitions:

Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, »Andy Warhol, Portraits«, 5 December 2005—10 January 2006. Literature:

Georg Frei and Neil Printz (Editors), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings and Sculpture 1961—1963, Vol. 1, 2002/2012, illustrated in colour, p. 423 and listed on p. 425, no. 482. Andy Warhol Portraits (Edited by Tony Shafrazi), 2007/2010, illustrated in colour p. 38. PA 55.023.

Andy Warhol, Bobby Short (phthalo green) Executed in October—November 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 51 × 40.5 cm. Provenance:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. , New York. Lang Fine Art and Jane Holzer. Private collection, Sweden. Exhibitions:

Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, »Andy Warhol, Portraits«, 5 December 2005—10 January 2006. Literature:

Georg Frei and Neil Printz (Editors), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings and Sculpture 1961—1963, Vol. 1, 2002/2012, illustrated in colour, p. 424 and listed on p. 425, no. 485. Andy Warhol »Giant Size« (Edited by Phaidon), 2006, illustrated in colour p. 262. Andy Warhol Portraits (Edited by Tony Shafrazi), 2007/2010, illustrated in colour p. 38. PA 55.029.

Andy Warhol

Bobby Short

Success is a job in New York Andy Warhol: Three Portraits of Bobby Short

by Pedro Westerdahl

Andy Warhol

hat success was a »job« that required, not only talent but also, a dedicated effort was a truth that wasn’t lost on Andy Warhol. Ever since arriving in New York, in the summer of 1949, Warhol set his mind firmly on achieving success. Initially building a reputation as a freelance illustrator, Warhol over the course of thirty-eight years created illustrations for more than four hundred magazine issues, a majority of which occurred at the beginning of his career (conventionally considered to be from 1948 to 1963).2) Throughout the 1950s, Warhol accepted assignments from all the major fashion magazines, including Mademoiselle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as well as from such stores as Tiffany & Co., Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman. His illustrations knew no bounds: he designed album covers, book jackets and newspaper ads and even illustrated the raindrops, suns and clouds used in early-morning television weather reports.3) His largest client however was I. Miller, a shoe company that brought him industrywide recognition and several awards from the Art Directors Club. Beginning in 1956, Warhol created stunningly original interpretations of shoes for I. Miller. The illustrations were published almost weekly as half-page ads in the New York Times.4) Less than ten years after his arrival in New York, Andy Warhol was well on his way to financial security and with his expanding income Warhol was earning more money than anyone in his family had dreamed possible. Warhol was delighted to find himself mentioned in a 1958 novelty book titled 1000 Names and Where to Drop Them. The book amusingly categorized prominent people under various headings, such as »Nescafé Society«. But Warhol had already transcended categories. He was listed not under »Artists« or »Fashion«, but »Big Business«.5) From the beginning, Warhol was driven to become the best in commercial design and illustration; having achieved that, he desperately wanted to be known as a serious artist. In June 1952, he had his first fine-art exhibition in New York at the Hugo Gallery on East Fifty-fifth Street with a series of drawings based on the fiction of Truman Capote. In October 1954 Warhol had the first of two solo

exhibitions at the Loft Gallery, an art space that was attached to an advertising agency’s studio. This was followed by two exhibitions at the Bodley Gallery in 1956, where he showed portraits of various men (in February) and shoe drawings (in December). The year 1956 also marked Warhol’s first appearance in a museum context, when his shoe pictures were included in a survey show at the Museum of Modern Art.6) Things were, however, about to change radically, as described by David Bourdon: Between the autumn of 1959 and the spring of 1961, Andy Warhol’s art underwent a dramatic, wholly unexpected, and largely inexplicable metamorphosis. During that period, he evolved from a stylish illustrator, noted for his playful and whimsical drawings, into a deadpan painter of comic strips and display ads, which he derived from newspapers and magazines and enlarged on canvas with a minimum of artistic transformation. Warhol based his paintings on commonplace subjects, displaying a preference for banal and ephemeral imagery with connotations of »low culture«. […] In embarking on this new course, he leaped from the periphery of the art world to somewhere near dead center — though the enormity of the move would not become immediately apparent.7) Even though he steadily continued to accept commissions to illustrate magazine covers etc., Warhol’s growing fame and reputation as an artist from ca. 1962 enabled him to focus more on his painting. Imagery based on comic strips and cartoons was now shown attention by the artist alongside objects of consumption and daily life: TV sets, iceboxes and Coca-Cola bottles. These early works were followed (mainly in 1961—1963) by the coolly quotidian Campbell’s Soup Cans and the shocking Death and Disaster series. Around this time Warhol decided to focus more on silkscreened paintings based on photographs rather than purely handpainted works. He began using photography to transfer found images such as Hollywood studio portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando onto canvas. In the end however these paintings were more images of »superstars« rather than actual portraits (a discipline Warhol would

Bobby Short

turn a lot of attention to from 1970 and onwards, but was yet to focus on). Warhol’s background as a commercial illustrator would play a significant role in his gradual move towards a broadening of his oeuvre to also include an, ever growing, amount of society portraits. In the June 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, a feature titled »NEW FACES, NEW FORCES, NEW NAMES IN THE ARTS« was illustrated by a layout of photographic portraits made in automated photobooth machines. Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga recalled the project and identified it as probably the first time that Warhol used »photomat« pictures.8) According to Ruth Ansel, who gave Warhol the assignment: I gave him the list of names, the people to be photographed, and he took them to some photomat machines … and came back with a series of portraits: out of focus, front, side, feet showing, heads cut off, everything wrong, and everything right because of it. I loved them and put them down on the page in the most honest way I could: not cropping, not making them look better, and certainly no retouching.9)

Previous spread

Hans Gedda, Andy Warhol (detail), 1976.

Andy Warhol

»I gave him the list of names, the people to be photographed, and he took them to some photomat machines … and came back with a series of portraits: out of focus, front, side, feet showing, heads cut off, everything wrong, and everything right because of it.«

Bobby Short

While the magazine staff selected the subjects, they also included people that Warhol knew, such as Rosalyn Drexler and Henry Geldzahler, as well as Warhol himself, who was given the following caption under his image: Andy Warhol, pioneer in the New Realist art, forced an ordinary Photomat to make dramatic portraits of all the personalities, including himself, for these four pages.10) The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings and Sculptures 1961—1963 relays the following information: The work that ensued directly from the commission was the portrait of Ethel Scull. Warhol also used photobooth pictures to produce commissioned portraits of himself and Judith Green, as well as portraits of Bobby Short, which were not commissioned.11) Gerard Malanga has recalled that the legendary portrait of Ethel Scull (Ethel Scull 36 times, 1963, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), referred to as »The first — and one of the best — of Warhol’s commissioned silkscreened portraits«,12) was executed during late June and early July.13) Ethel Scull herself told reporter Emily Genauer about the artistic process (Warhol had made a date to take her to a photographer…) behind the monumental portrait in Ladies Home Journal the following year: I expected to see Avedon or somebody like that. Instead we went to one of those places on Forty-second Street where you put a quarter in a machine and take three pictures. We kept two booths going for an hour.14) The Ethel Scull commission of mid-1963 is a pivotal work that marks a shift in the way Warhol structured seriality, which is pointed out in the Catalogue Raisonné: The large-scale serial works of 1962—1963 (from the serial soup cans to the ›death‹ series), in which the image was repeated within a fixed composition, yielded to generally smaller works that could be produced as individual units in a series or assembled as multipanel compositions.15) This vital fact is also touched upon by David Bourdon: Warhol radically altered the format of his paintings during the firehouse [Warhol’s studio on 159 East 87th Street] period. […]

After 1963, he seldom silkscreened more than one solitary image on a canvas; the final size of a painting could expand or contract depending on how many panels were added or removed. Collectors, he reasoned, could buy as many units as they wanted and hang them in any order they chose. The final disposition of the panels did not much matter to him.16) For the Ethel Scull commission as with the other portraits based on photobooth pictures, Warhol produced more paintings than the commission required, creating an auxiliary corpus of studio works (as the Catalogue Raisonné points out: »Indeed, the Bobby Short paintings never left the studio« 17) ). This was clearly the case with the nine portraits of Bobby Short. Bobby Short (1924—2005) was an American cabaret singer and pianist, best known for his interpretations of songs by popular composers of the first half of the 20th century such as Sir Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hart and George & Ira Gershwin. He also championed AfricanAmerican composers of the same period such as Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. Short began his musical career in the clubs in the 1940s. In 1968 he was offered a two-week stint at the Café Carlyle in New York City, where he was to become an institution as he remained there as a featured performer for over 35 years! Bobby Short was signed to Atlantic Records in the 1950s by the company’s legendary co-founder Ahmet Ertegun. He went on to record for the label for over three decades, releasing a series of acclaimed albums devoted to the great songwriters of the 20th century. Upon Short’s passing on March 21, 2005, Ertegun (who passed away the following year) issued the following statement: Bobby Short made his first albums for Atlantic in the mid-1950s — legendary records that introduced him as the major interpreter in the world of the most important American, British, and French composers of 20th century standards. He was also an authority on many of the more obscure works of Vernon Duke, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Andy Razaf, and many others.

Andy Warhol

In the late-1960s, my friend Peter Sharp bought the Carlyle Hotel and asked me to recommend someone to play in the café. I introduced Peter to Bobby Short, and for the next 36 years, his extraordinary and enduring presence at the Café Carlyle made him a destination for visitors to New York from around the globe.18) Short continued his career in the 1970s and 1980s singing for films and television. In the early 1980s he (like Andy Warhol) made a cameo appearance on The Love Boat and in 1986 he appeared in the Woody Allen film Hannah and Her Sisters alongside Sir Michael Caine and Max von Sydow to name but few. In 2000, the Library of Congress designated Bobby Short a Living Legend, a recognition established as part of its bicentennial celebration. In 1963, however, Short still had quite some way to go towards being recognized as a »Living Legend« so the answer to why Warhol settled on Short as a suitable subject remains somewhat unclear to this very day. But, as was often the case with Warhol, any person that crossed his path was deemed to be a potential »superstar«, especially if you were a young, talented and charming performer in the fields of art and entertainment. The Catalogue Raisonné lists nine canvases [cat. nos. 477—485], each measuring 50.8 × 40.6 cm and showing four different views of singer Bobby Short, that were found in Warhol’s studio after his death.19) These views probably correspond to a single photobooth strip, which has yet to be located (even though one of the canvases in this sale [cat no. 485 in the Catalogue Raisonné], despite slight discrepancies, is rather similar to an exposure20) found in the Warhol archive). Bobby Short recalled that Warhol hade earlier made a drawing (current whereabouts unknown) of his feet propped against a piano.21) The drawing obviously relates to Warhol’s earlier career as a freelance illustrator (where shoes and feet were recurring themes) but also to certain aspects of Warhol’s personality as described by David Bourdon: Warhol parlayed his reputation as a sophisticated draftsman into a manipulative, but surefire way to get attractive young men to strip for him. […] Whenever he met a good-looking youth, he would say, »I could

use you. I want to draw your feet«. He filled whole sketch pads with foot drawings, often in erotic, if incongruous, juxtapositions with other anatomical parts.22) Short also remembers accompanying Warhol to make the photobooth pictures (an occasion documented in a preserved photobooth strip23) in which they appear together). The Catalogue Raisonné entails the following information regarding the nine canvases depicting Bobby Short from 1963: He [Bobby Short] does not remember, however, that a portrait based on these pictures was ever discussed, nor was one commissioned. The paintings have been dated to November, based on Gerard Malanga’s recollection that they were made probably in the late fall of 1963, when the unheated Firehouse studio was especially cold. The portraits were never exhibited in Warhol’s lifetime and were all reserved in the studio and unknown — even to the subject himself — until after Warhol’s death.24) Having been basically unknown to the rest of the world and tucked away in the privacy of Warhol’s studio, until they were rediscovered after his untimely death, these early examples of Warhol’s quirky and emblematic style of portraiture are now gaining more and more attention, whilst at the same time proving more and more important. The three paintings in the current sale were all included in the exhibition »Andy Warhol, Portraits« (bringing together some 137 paintings — the largest display of Warhol’s portraits to date) at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York (5 December 2005— 10 January 2006) where they added vital information to our knowledge of Warhol’s earliest ventures into the field of portraiture. In sharp contrast to the more prolific portraits from 1970 and onwards (where the result was usually based on a carefully edited silkscreen chosen from one of up to one hundred polaroids depicting the subject) these early photobooth based silk-screen portraits demonstrates not only Warhol’s seemingly playful (but still highly professional) attitude to art but also, perhaps more importantly, tells the tale of the pivotal change Warhol’s art underwent in 1963. Alongside the portraits of Ethel Scull and the legendary self-portraits of the same year

Bobby Short

these three paintings are among the first multi-panel works that were to become intimately associated with Warhol's aesthetics for the rest of his career. It seems only suitable that a man that would later on in life be proclaimed a »Living Legend« caught the eye of Andy Warhol as early on as 1963. Almost as if Warhol could foresee the long and prosperous career that lay ahead of Bobby Short in 1963, he chose to depict him just the way he had already depicted other established stars from the world of television and cinema. Warhol thus incorporated Bobby Short in his pantheon of celebrities, the portraits of which were to be one of the foundations of his entire artistic output. As Carter Ratcliff puts it: He wanted us to see how good the entire population looks, how various and unexpected and glamorous everyone is and can hardly help being, so long as we remain attentive.25) Warhol’s use of photobooth strips as source material, his choice of the silkscreen technique as an artistic medium and his earlier experiences from the world of commercial illustration all contributed to subsequent breakthroughs in his paintings around this time. Inspired by the images from TV as well as cinema, Warhol interpreted the effects of the mediums in his art. The constant »slipping« and »sliding« of images on early television and the magnification of images on the silver screen — and subsequently on Warhol’s canvases — added irresistible drama to the faces of movie stars and other subjects alike. Tony Shafrazi writes in Andy Warhol Portraits, 2005: In Warhol’s case, of course, this magnification is frozen in painting. Suddenly the image is no longer an accumulation of frames from a movie, it is singular, the singular graphic image hitting a colored background — whack! The silkscreening process perfectly mimics the isolated flickering image as it hits the screen, registers for a moment, and is gone. That is the poetry in Warhol’s work, his extraordinary sensitivity in freezing a lyrical instant of time.26)•

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

Title of Katherine Sonntag’s article in Glamour, 1949; illustrated by Andy Warhol as his first commercial commission. Reproduced in: Kenneth Goldsmith, ›Success is a Job in New York‹, article in Andy Warhol »Giant« Size, 2006, p. 15. Paul Maréchal, Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Magazine Work, 1948—1987. Catalogue Raisonné, 2014, p. 9. Goldsmith, p. 14. Ibid. David Bourdon, Warhol, 1989, p. 61. Goldsmith, p. 14. Bourdon, p. 62. Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 1986, p. 413. Emile De Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940—1970, 1984, pp. 122—23. Harper’s Bazaar, June 1963, p. 67, reproduced in Maréchal, p. 303. Georg Frei & Neil Printz (Ed.), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings and Sculptures 1961—1963, 2002/2012, p. 409. Bourdon, p. 158. Frei & Printz (Ed.), p. 410. Emily Genauer, »Can This Be Art«, article in Ladies Home Journal, March 1964, pp. 151—55. Frei & Printz (Ed.), p. 410. Bourdon, p. 158. Frei & Printz (Ed.), p. 410. Bob Kaus, VP, Communications & Chronicles, Warner Music Group, New York, e-mail correspondence with the author, October 20, 2015. Frei & Printz (Ed.), p. 421—425. Reproduced as »fig. 265 Photobooth studies of Bobby Short, 1963« on p. 425 in: Frei & Printz (Ed.). Frei & Printz (Ed.), p. 421. Bourdon, p. 55. Reproduced as »fig. 266 Photobooth studies of Bobby Short with Andy Warhol, 1963« on p. 425 in: Frei & Printz (Ed.). Frei & Printz (Ed.), p. 421. Carter Ratcliff, »Looking Good: Andy Warhol’s Utopian Portraiture«, article in Andy Warhol Portraits, 2010, p. 21. Tony Shafrazi, »Andy Warhol: Portraits«, article in Andy Warhol Portraits, 2010, p. 16.

Contemporary & Design No 588 Stockholm

Auction 11 November 2015 Arsenalsgatan 2 Viewing 4â&#x20AC;&#x201D;10 November 2015 Berzelii Park 1 Please note that the sale also takes place online at www.bukowskis.com

For enquiries or advice, please contact us.

Anna Persson

Head of Art Department & Specialist Contemporary Art +46 735 602 283 anna.persson @bukowskis.com

Pedro Westerdahl Specialist Art 19th/20th Century +46 761 366 633 pedro.westerdahl @bukowskis.com

Ebba Bozorgnia Head of Sales

+46 709 995 855 ebba.bozorgnia @bukowskis.com

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Author Pedro Westerdahl Print Ineko, Stockholm ÂŠ Bukowskis 2015

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