Starmaker

Too many people believe that Andy Warhol created the cover images for Interview magazine,” says Mauricio Padilha, co-founder of MAO Public Relations (along with his brother, Roger). These longstanding assumptions are entirely wrong.

The covers – a 17-year series of depictions of celebrities such as Madonna, Mick Jagger, Cher, Calvin Klein, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin – were actually crafted by the late Richard Bernstein, a forgotten figure who the Padilhas call ‘The Man who made everyone look so famous.’

The miscarriage of justice is understandable, Mauricio admits – and not only due to the Pop Art mood of the images.

“When Warhol would go out in Union Square in Manhattan, for example, people would take the magazine off the newsstands for Warhol to sign, and he would oblige, so people automatically assumed it was his work. Unless you were in the fashion pack or the art world, you would be oblivious to their creator.”

Warhol created Interview in 1969 as a movie magazine, and it followed this format for five years. Its editorials critiqued films with an intellectual air, with stock photography covers.

“Warhol got bored with the content,” explains Mauricio. “He wanted it to be about glamour, jet-setters, and the inside of a lifestyle that not everybody was able to see. Part of this was asking Richard to change the covers, to put more current celebrities on the covers and make the magazine more glamorous.”

Bernstein was a contemporary of Warhol, a few years younger, but who started showing in galleries in the same year – 1964. He had a fine art background yet painted images of giant pills in acid colours; an image of The Beatles, naked, in bright neon; gigantic canvases in the shape of stretched hearts in psychedelic hues.

He returned from a stint in Europe and was working for the Interview art department, creating comparatively subdued work. The turning point was his friendship with singer and supermodel Grace Jones, regarded Bernstein’s best friend.

“When she started out in the industry, Richard befriended her. She told us that when she would throw house parties, ‘Richard was the only one who would show up. Nobody knew me, nobody was supportive of me’,” relays Mauricio. She considered Bernstein as family.

Jones allowed him to create an image to adorn her first single I Need a Man, in what would become Bernstein’s signature style: a pastelenhanced photograph of the singer, placed against a bold background (in this case, hot pink), with facial features enhanced by copious amounts of tastefully applied ‘makeup’.

Warhol saw it and was jolted: “Richard has created a few conventional covers of Interview, but why don’t any of them look like this?!” Jones enlightened him: “That’s because I give him complete freedom. He takes my photo and then he paints it, and whatever he gives me is what I use for my album covers. And when he goes to the offices of Interview with his ideas, he would be told to make changes.”

Warhol marched into the offices and told the art department that, from that day forward, ‘I want you to leave Richard alone and let him do whatever he wants to do.’

To understand Bernstein’s unique visual take, one has to look back at his childhood, explains Mauricio. “As a kid he was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. The first time that he saw it, his eyes bugged out, his sister said, and every time it would play his mother would take him again to see it because it starts out as black and white and then becomes such crazy, vivid colours; it had a profound impact on him.”

Every previous cover for Interview had been stock photography, black and white. “When he started doing his now famed covers,” says Padilha,“it’s almost like he opened a door and was no longer in Kansas.”

Bernstein’s unique technique makes him ‘the Godfather of the filter’, the book’s co-author adds.

“His pre-Photoshop approach was to paint on top of the photography. He worked with photographers on set, styling the shoot. He would then take the images and start cutting them out, placing the subject on top of other coloured paper. He would use wrapping paper, ribbon… anything he could get that would pop a vibrant splash in there. Then he would paint over the photography, or would use the photo as the basis for a painting. Celebrities would come in with no makeup, and he would create their makeup palette in his own version of post-production.”

Given carte blanche, his first Interview cover was of Diana Ross – “A closeup of her face with big diamond earrings and a huge smile, enhanced with his own eye-catching makeup palette,” explains Mauricio, adding, “That edition was seismic, becoming Interview’s top selling issue.”

After Ross, the publication covered the likes of Vogue model Marisa Berenson and actress Donna Jordan, people who weren’t ‘mainstream’ at that time. Later, when the magazine became more popular, they gravitated towards the likes of John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise et al.

Bernstein’s interpretations would often ignite change within the person in question, sometimes altering how they viewed (and eventually, styled) themselves.

His approach was to paint on top of the photography... Celebrities would come in with no makeup, and he would create their makeup palette. Bernstein is the Godfather of Filter

“Grace Jones did not start to look like the Grace Jones we conjure in our mind until he started adapting her photographs and painting her makeup,” remarks Mauricio. “She began applying her makeup that same way as Bernstein depicted her, taking off her eyebrows, and becoming more chiseled looking. He would take a celebrity, and make them into the way he saw them.”

So too with Madonna, who was on the cover in 1984. “Back then she had a very Cherubic face with big lips, and he portrayed her as very angular, with high cheekbones. If you look at the image now, you think ‘Wow, that’s what Madonna eventually morphed into.’ He made them look more famous.”

Bernstein’s depiction of Jones serves as the cover for a book on the artist, Richard Bernstein, Starmaker: Andy Warhol’s Cover Artist, published by Rizzoli. It marks a fourth literary outing for the brothers, who co-authored coffee table tomes on fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, artist Antonio Lopez and photographer Chris Von Wangenheim.

“We have a list of 10 people we want to write books on, and Richard Bernstein had always been on our list,” Mauricio enthuses. “Out of the blue, his nephew contacted us through Instagram, saying ‘I love what you did with your other projects, and the family has always wanted a book dedicated to Richard – would you be interested?’”

“I asked him, ‘How much work do his archives contain?’ He said, ‘We don’t have much, but you should come and take a look.’” The brothers travelled to Bernstein’s sister’s house in Connecticut and stepped into her basement. “There were hundreds and hundreds of boxes – it was insanity; there was enough material there to compile three books, let alone one,” Mauricio recalls.

“We would open up one box and it would be unpublished photos of Diana Freeland; open another and we’d find paintings that were rolled up and thrown in a box, all untouched since 2002, when he passed away. Everything was taken from the Chelsea Hotel in which he stayed, and put into this basement. They family didn’t know what they were sitting on.”

That’s because praise for his portfolio is retrospective, explains Mauricio. “At the time his work was not considered to be of great value – even by the artist himself. His commercial work was not considered ‘art’. Back then, you could not be both a fine artist and a commercial artist the way that you can now; it was frowned upon.”

The reason that Warhol did not make the Interview covers “was because he was concentrating on selling his fine art – had there not been the stigma, I think he may have done the work himself.”

He cites daring Keith Haring as the first artist “To break the barrier with his Pop Shop [a Soho store that sold memorabilia such as t-shirts and postcards bearing Haring’s graffitilike work].” But for Bernstein, while creating the covers between 1972 and 1989 provided an income, it was something of a poisoned chalice.

“It was hard for him to get the prices on his artwork that a Warhol (or his contemporaries) could command. He would give away his cover work, or throw the things in a box. He was in no way precious about his art.”

Bernstein departed before the internet explosion; to the Padilha brothers, his obscurity makes him “an unsung hero who deserves credit for the inspiration and influence he has given to so many.”

Operating their New York City-based PR firm, the brothers work with a lot of young designers “Who will remark, ‘Oh, those are the covers that Andy Warhol made’, and we’ll say ‘No!’ – It frustrates us,” laughs Mauricio. He recomposes to add, more seriously, “It’s about time people knew Richard Bernstein existed.” ‘Richard Bernstein Starmaker: Andy Warhol’s Cover Artist’ is written by Roger and Mauricio Padilha, available from Rizzoli