Notebook #5: Andy Warhol, Ramsay MacDonald, Bill Ryder-Jones
A pop artist, a prime minister, a curly-mop singer-songwriter
Man of the cloth
Where did Andy Warhol come from? The straight answer is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was born to working-class Slav immigrants from what is now Slovakia.
But where did Andy Warhol the artist come from? That question is answered convincingly in an absorbing new exhibition at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.
Andy Warhol: The Textiles examines his early career as an illustrator and graphic designer in New York in the 1950s. This meticulously researched show, created by the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, brings together dozens of examples of Warhol’s work on fabric and shows how his designs were used by dressmakers.
A flavour of what Warhol was like at this point in his life can be gleaned from a candid profile in the New Yorker by Joan Acocella:
Warhol lived in a series of roach-ridden sublets, usually shares, while trying to break into commercial illustration. Once, when he was showing samples of his work to the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, an insect crawled out of his portfolio, to his mortification. The editor felt so sorry for him that she gave him an assignment.
There was a relentlessness about the young Warhol’s ambition.
Warhol was not shy. In the Museum of Modern Art, he went up to a staffer and proposed that he design Christmas cards for the gift shop. (He got the job.) A friend remembered seeing him in a bookstore, flipping through the record bins to see which labels were doing the most interesting jackets. Then he went home and cold-called the art directors. “He was like a little Czech tank,” another friend said.
Acocella dwells on Warhol’s sexuality:
Many people who met him in those years, and later, found him strange—a “weird little creep,” in the words of one. He was unabashedly homosexual, and in the early fifties that was weird enough. He liked to do drawings of nude boys, their nipples and crotches dotted with little hearts, like soft kisses. If he met a man who appealed to him, he might say that he liked to photograph penises, and would this man mind? “No, of course not,” one self-possessed British curator replied. “What are you going to use them for?” “Oh, I don’t know yet,” Warhol said. “I’m just taking the pictures.” The man unzipped.
Acocella is a tad unabashed herself. She is good on the young Warhol’s strange relationship with his mother:
Three years after Warhol arrived in New York, his mother turned up on his doorstep. She explained to one of his friends, “I come here to take care of my Andy, and when he’s okay I go home.” She stayed for almost twenty years…Warhol seems to have been hesitant to introduce her to his friends. On the other hand, one boyfriend said he thought Warhol was grateful for her presence, because it gave him an excuse not to have sex. He would explain to his guest that he didn’t want to make any bedroom noises as long as his mother was within earshot.
The Dovecot show is a superb example of art archeology. It shows how Warhol developed the techniques he would later use in the pop art screen prints that brought him global fame.
Those indelible images of a heavy-lidded Marilyn Monroe, of Elvis as a gunslinger, of Jackie Kennedy in widow’s weeds, did not spring miraculously from Warhol’s imagination in The Factory, his studio on East 47th Street, in the 1960s. They were the simple extrapolation of techniques he had been using as a commercial artist for more than a decade.
One of these techniques is known as the “blotted broken line”, a rudimentary printing process whereby an artist draws an image and then copies it by tracing over its outline, section by section, and pressing the still-wet ink onto a sheet of absorbent paper. This is then repeated to make a pattern.
In the Dovecot show there is a dizzying array of these designs. Dozens of them. Motifs include toffee apples, lemon slices, socks, insects, boots, rulers, hats, ice cream cones, brushes and brooms, acrobats on horses, and slices of watermelon arranged to look like the petals of a flower.
Some are done in a series of colourways, a precursor of the technique that first came to the art world’s attention with Warhol’s Campbell’s soup tins in 1962.
Tina Fredericks, a friend of Warhol from his earliest time in New York, says his work as a graphic designer in the 1950s is the key to understanding the pop art genius of the 1960s.
His ink lines were electrifying. Fragmented, broken and intriguing, they grabbed bat you with their spontaneous intensity. There was something wallpaperish about the way the drawing covered the space. Much later, of course, we could see these as the precursors to the multiple coke bottles, the cow heads, the infinite repetitive silk-screens of Marilyn and Mao.
Warhol’s work designing stationery for Bergdorf Goodman, album covers for Columbia Records and Christmas cards for Tiffany is well documented. Much less well known is his work on fabric, which allowed him more free rein. The rag trade knew Warhol would deliver and trusted him to do whatever he wanted. The result is the crucial missing link between Warhol’s purely commercial hack work early in his career and his later freedom as king of pop art.
Around 40 examples of Warhol’s work on textiles have been identified so far but it is thought there are many more.
Included in the Dovecot exhibition are dresses and swimsuits made from fabrics with Warhol designs. These feel like definitive 1950s womenswear with their candy colours and bold graphics. Yet it would be a mistake to think of Warhol as in any way a fashion designer. He tended to work without a product in mind. His designs could just as likely end up as department store wrapping paper as being tuned into a summer dress or a swimsuit. What mattered to Warhol was the image itself, not the ultimate form or function.
The exhibition joins Warhol’s dots. Watching these connections being made is deeply satisfying. Warhol’s most celebrated works are so familiar, so distinctive, so instantly recognisable, it is a revelation to be shown their antecedents and to understand better how they came to be.
Andy Warhol: the Textiles is like being let in on a long-held secret by an old friend you thought you knew inside out. It is a life lesson well learned: always look for patterns.
# Andy Warhol: The Textiles is at Dovecot Studio, Edinburgh, until May 18.
-o0o-
Big Mac
When the first Labour government took power in Britain a century ago this year the mood in some corners of the aristocracy was close to panic.
Less than six years previously the Bolshevik revolution had seen the grisly assassination of the Romanov royal family, with the Russian king, queen and their five children shot or bayoneted to death.
Both the Romanov king and queen were first cousins of the British monarch, George V. To the British ruling class the Russian royals were family. Now a political party that prided in singing The Red Flag was taking power in the palace of Westminster.
Was the socialists’ battle hymn a blood-soaked portent of violence to come?
The people's flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their hearts' blood dyed in every foldThen raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath its folds we'll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We'll keep the red flag flying here
Among some in Britain’s titled class the fear, however febrile and ill-informed, was that the barbarians were at the gates.
All this is vividly described in David Torrance’s new book, The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government. The wild men of the title is drawn from a popular belief in the upper classes that Labour politicians were little more than savages from benighted corners of the kingdom where a gentleman might fear to tread.
Which is why James Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Lossiemouth ploughman and a housemaid, proved such a significant figure at the time, and why lessons of his short-lived 1924 premiership are still being learned today.
Torrance’s book examines that first Labour administration through the eyes of MacDonald and four other cabinet ministers: Philip Snowden, an austere man who had to learn how to walk again after a road accident left him paralysed; Arthur Henderson, a Glaswegian who began work in an iron foundry aged 12; John Wheatley, a Lanarkshire miner steeped in the moral doctrines of Catholic socialism; and Jimmy Thomas, who was working on the Welsh railways before he was a teenager.
These are all impressive and compelling characters with rich personal histories. And yet it is MacDonald who, if this was a movie, steals every scene.
Why? Because of his complexity, as a man caught between the worlds of poverty and privilege. Because of his tragic backstory, having lost his beloved wife Margaret, a social reformer, to blood poisoning when she was 41. Because of the charisma that allowed him to charm a duchess one minute and a contingent of steel workers the next. And because of the personal papers he left behind, which to my reading are among the most emotionally literate accounts we have from a 20th century politician.
Even now, in 2024, MacDonald’s name divides opinion. Many in the Labour movement will never forgive him for what they regard as his betrayal in 1931 in forming a national government with the Tories amid global financial turmoil. The events of 1931 have tended to overshadow MacDonald’s leadership in 1924.
I feel this is unfair. The way MacDonald conducted himself during the 1924 election and the nine short months of power that followed, assuaged the fears of many in Britain’s ruling class. They included the king himself, and Torrance’s book is remarkable for its description of the two men’s relationship at a time when “the crown in parliament” was more than just a constitutional convention.
A Labour leader with less charm, less emotional intelligence, less of an ability to reconcile factionalism, would have turned the face of the British establishment against Labour rule, regardless of how people voted at the ballot box. MacDonald normalised the notion of a socialist in Downing Street. In doing so he smoothed the way for the more substantial and consequential Labour governments that followed.
MacDonald accepted the blame for the early demise of the first Labour government. A snap election was needlessly called over a smear story designed to make Labour look like Bolshevik agents. The prime minister, who had the additional role of foreign secretary, was physically and mentally exhausted, his judgment impaired.
“I felt,” he later said, “like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea.”
Defeat was hard to bear. Wheatley declined to wear a morning tailcoat on his visit to the palace to surrender his seal of office, instead wearing a short jacket. “We have lost office,” he said. “We have gained the right to be ourselves.”
A bruised MacDonald escaped with an old comrade to do some hillwalking in the West Country. “If friends fail,” he later wrote, “the hill road never does.” MacDonald described walking past tattered election posters for a local Conservative candidate, one declaring: “For Britons and no Bolshies”.
And then this lovely sentence, for which I can forgive MacDonald everything:
“Then came the woods and the hills and the sea, the Ship Inn with its noisy bar - and sleep.”
# David Torrance’s The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government is published by Bloomsbury
-o0o-
Curly Wirraly
My album of the moment comes from an artist I try to see every time he tours. Down the years I have watched Bill Ryder-Jones play in a tent at a festival when everybody else was elsewhere watching somebody more famous; at a former veterinary school with an audience of art students who all had Bill Ryder-Jones haircuts; and in a tiny bar on Leith Walk, just Bill and a guitar, when a bunch of drunk lads wouldn’t stop talking during the quiet numbers.
Every single time he gives his all. To amend a football cliche, he leaves it all on stage. His commitment is total, even when the subject matter of his songs is deeply personal, such as the death of his brother Daniel in a cliff fall when they were kids growing up in the Wirral.
The emotional intensity he brings to his songs is well represented by this single from the new album, with an extraordinary video directed by James Slater:
This album, called Iechyd Da, foregrounds Ryder-Jones playing the piano. There is a lovely late Beatles quality about it. But I am already looking forward to when he feels he can pick up a guitar again. Nobody plays electric guitar quite like Bill Ryder-Jones.
Take this example from West Kirby Country Primary, from 2015:
That coda, when he sings “they say that desperate times call for desperate pleasures”, has got me through a few dark moments.
I mentioned his brother Daniel. The aftermath of that loss is explored in heart-breaking detail in this song below, the power of which never fails to hit home. I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of songs about family tragedies. This one is right up there.
Like every Bill Ryder-Jones song its hallmark is emotional truth. In troubled times when falsehood and fakery abound, this is an artist to cherish.
# Iechyd Da by Bill Ryder-Jones is out now on Domino Records
-o0o-
Agree? Disagree? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Do you know someone who might like this post? Please feel free to share it.
Are you a subscriber to The Jaggy Thistle? If so, thank you! If you’re not a subscriber, why not sign up now? Say no to FOMO! Carpe Diem! It’s free!
Fab post as ever. Totally random subjects, each I wanted to read. Hope the guy does 1929 Lab government as a he is a humble clerk in the H of Commons but has written a tour deforce. Last book on this contentious subject this good was Ben Pimlot's Labour and the Left in the 1930's' . link between Warhol commercial work and later pop art God status makes perfect sense. Fab stuff as ever. Off to see 'Zone of Interest'.
I can't stop listening to the new Bill Ryder-Jones either, perfect mood lifter at a horrible time of year. And thanks for the Warhol tip, an excuse to head to Edinburgh as soon as I can.