Playboy's Warhols

Last year, there was an ad in Artforum magazine announcing the first exhibition of Andy Warhol's drawings since his death in 1987. Of all the famous, and infamous, images that might have been displayed to represent the man's work, the one selected was Warhol's interpretation of the Playboy Rabbit Head, which appeared on the magazine's January 1986 cover. It was an appropriate choice. The image neatly characterizes the career of a commercial artist who appropriated cultural icons, made them his own artistically and gained fame and fortune in doing so. It also acknowledged the long-standing relationship between Warhol and Playboy.

Although he is currently being eulogized as a subversive pop artist, Warhol was first and foremost a commercial artist who was determined to think like one. His plan from the start was to attain, and capitalize on, mass-media stardom. His works commissioned by Playboy from 1961 to 1985 constitute a record of that pursuit.

The earliest Warhol work in the Playboy collection is an illustration for a story titled The Night the Roxy Opened, which Warhol completed for the October 1961 issue of Show Business Illustrated, which was published by Playboy. The piece was done just as Warhol was slowing down his career in advertising to make paintings and sculptures addressed to major collectors, critics and museums. Presumably, Warhol traced the theater interior and the crowd of faces from one or more photographs in his extensive clippings file and added hot washes of color and collage glitter as accents. He always tried to bring his work into line with the five-and-ten-cent-store world that he used—with his good business sense—as a common denominator to help achieve mass appeal.

Soon after, advertising artist turned pop artist Andy Warhol burst onto the scene. Plagiarized familiar commercial-art images—ranging from Campbell's Soup labels and fan-magazine photographs of Hollywood stars to the front-page layouts of high-circulation newspapers—Warhol's paintings and sculptures were hailed as works that revealed the mass-production soul of American consumer society. It was Warhol's pop-art celebration of ultimate sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor that led Playboy founding Art Director Arthur Paul to invite him to submit a work for a January 1967 feature titled The Playmate as Fine Art, showcasing nudes by 11 prominent painters and sculptors. Warhol had already been invited in 1963 to contribute to the Pace Gallery's First International Girlie Show. Indeed, what he sent to Playboy in 1967 was simply another version of the somewhat gimmicky painting he had made for that occasion.

Like most of Warhol's paintings after 1962, the nude-torsos painting was based on a photograph transferred onto a silk screen, so that he and his assistants could print an unlimited number of nearly identical canvases as demand called for them. Only three versions of the early nude-torso idea are known, making it something of a rarity.

The work probably grew out of Warhol's earliest attempts at film making in 1963. With films such as Blow Job, Sleep and Kiss, he made fun of traditional film clichés, those from Hollywood features and from so-called blue movies. In an interview published in November of that year, Warhol, who had already begun to make underground-film parodies of blue movies, confessed that he wanted to pursue the sort of erotic subject usually frowned upon in serious modern painting: "My next series will be (text continued on page 208)Warhols(continued from page 106) pornographic pictures. They will look blank. When you turn on the black lights, then you see them—big breasts. If a cop came in, you could just flick out the lights or turn on the regular lights—how could you say that was pornography?"

By the late Sixties, Warhol came to the conclusion that the shock appeal of sex might help gain wider recognition and bigger profits for his movies. Films such as Fuck (a.k.a. Blue Movie), with a Warholian close-up of his superstar Viva going down on her leading man, took this to an extreme. The first issue of his film magazine Interview appeared in the fall of 1969, its cover showing nude actors and actresses from his own company for newsstand shock value.

Playboy ran a long story about Warhol in September 1969, commissioning the subject himself to supply the artwork to illustrate the feature, titled What Is a Warhol? The artist submitted perhaps the most extraordinary self-portraits that he ever made: a group of seven death-mask-like images on copy-machine paper—the single most moving record of Warhol's otherwise relatively private career during an especially precarious moment in his life. They followed soon after the artist's near-fatal encounter with a gun-wielding would-be actress who emptied her weapon at Warhol in his studio, called the Factory.

For those seven images, Warhol dispensed with both photography and painting in favor of copy-machine technology. Closing his eyes tight against the machine's long flash, Warhol placed his face on the large glass screen in profile and full-face poses that might be interpreted as stills of a see-hear-speak-no-evil philosophy. Less than fully satisfied with the downbeat works, Art Paul returned them to Warhol with the request that he add some color. Ever compliant to the needs of a client, Warhol (or one of his associates) scribbled graffitilike beards and borders on three of them.

Before that time, Warhol had always used photographs that he found in magazines or appropriated from other photographers. Now he began to take his own in the spirit of the Playboy copy-machine series. Warhol tried his hand at all sorts of snapshots, many of them to be published in books designed to document and satirize Seventies and Eighties society. He became the ubiquitous token artist, welcomed with his camera into the privacy of Jimmy Carter's back yard to play with Amy and into the dressing room to watch Bianca Jagger shave her underarms.

It was as a photographer that Warhol next appeared in Playboy, in August 1974. Paul believes that Warhol himself may have submitted the seven astounding photocollages now in the Playboy collection in order to publicize Dracula and Frankenstein, two Warhol-produced films that were distributed in 1974. Those works, each a surreal overlapping sequence of disjointed photographs of consecutive close-up views of undraped figures, are perhaps Warhol's most ambitious photographic works. Predicated on careful poses so that each shot in each sequence is a photograph of interest in its own right, the interlocking shots make cubist compositions of cockeyed originality. Four of them were recently selected for a Warhol retrospective in Japan.

With the success of Interview during the Seventies, Warhol emerged as a publisher and advocate for hedonistic consumerism. His subject was no less than modern society, and he interacted with its most staid, and outlandish, fringes whenever the occasion presented itself. He debunked what he found on those reconnaissance missions, pointing out in Exposures, his book of photographs published in 1979, that today "anyone rich, powerful, beautiful or famous can get into Society." Hugh M. Hefner and his girlfriend Barbi Benton are included in Warhol's extensive group portrait of late-Seventies society, just as much a part of the American scene in Warhol's view as the Carters or John and Elizabeth Taylor Warner.

Warhol's next assignment for Playboy involved another celebrity—his personal idol, Tennessee Williams. When Warhol went to New York in 1949, he would give copies of Williams' plays and stories to friends as gifts. By April 1973, Warhol was able to run his own interview with his hero in his own magazine, simultaneously with the feature that appeared in Playboy. To mark Williams' death, Playboy commissioned Truman Capote to write an article for its January 1984 issue and commissioned his friend Warhol to paint posthumous portraits based on photographs of Williams that had appeared with the April 1973 Playboy Interview with him. Befitting Warhol's attachment to his subject, the portraits are among the finest he ever completed.

The Rabbit Head cover of the January 1986 Playboy tells much about Warhol's tremendous success as an artist and as a businessman. Ever the crafty professional, he submitted four paintings in different colors to Playboy. The magazine was entitled to select one of the four as its cover image in exchange for Warhol's fee for the work. The artist knew that the three other versions would potentially increase his fee ten- or 20-fold when sold to art dealers. What he did not seem to realize was that Playboy would need to have its version signed to add an extra cachet to the cover, which bore Warhol's unmistakable imprint with or without his signature. What's more, the artist himself, who would readily sign anything for any souvenir collector, never signed his paintings. But Playboy approached the artist for a signature, and he obliged, sending one to be attached to the cover mock-up. So the cover is a rarity of rarities: a signed Warhol.

In his nearly 30-year-long relationship with Playboy, Warhol was illustrator, artist and even rival publisher. The results of this collaboration, and competition, go far in defining his life and work. It is a remarkable legacy, and one that Playboy readers have enjoyed from an advantageous viewpoint: the pages of the magazine you hold in your hands.