WARHOL, Andy | Untitled (Camille series)
July - October, 1952.
Seven photographic postcards (5 ¼” x 3 ¼”) with collaged text; matted in a 60 ¼” x 20 ¼” frame.
After graduating from Carnegie-Mellon University (then Carnegie Tech) in 1949, Andy Warhol moved to New York with fellow student Philip Pearlstein and sought out work as a commercial illustrator. “On Andy’s fourth or fifth day of interviews,” Pearlstein wrote, “he landed a major assignment for an important fashion magazine: a full-page drawing of several women’s shoes on the rungs of a ladder” [“In Philip Pearlstein’s Autobiography, Warhol Is a Major Character,” ARTNews, April 25, 2014]. The assignment was for Glamour and its art director, Tina Fredericks. One whimsical drawing of an orchestra intrigued her enough to ask how much he wanted for it. Fredericks, who was five months pregnant at the time, thought it would be a great addition to the nursery she was planning. He gave it to her for free [Barbara Klein,“The Invention of Andy Warhol,” Carnegie (Summer 2018)].
Fredericks first put Warhol in touch with the fashion photographer Otto Fenn, a gay man some 15 years his senior, who ultimately took the budding young artist under his wing. As Warhol’s biographer Blake Gopnik recounts:
Fenn’s two-story studio was just up the street from Café Nicholson, and the basement ceiling had little rounds of glass that let you look up at the feet of passersby on the sidewalk above. By the time that Warhol became a regular there the studio had hosted Jean Cocteau and also Gore Vidal, newly famous for his gay novel [The City and the Pillar, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948] and photographed by his good friend Fenn in a topless sailor pose. . . . Warhol paid him almost daily visits and made some of his own works in Fenn’s studio while also providing Fenn with painted props for his shoots. They even collaborated on a Christmas card sent out from Fenn’s studio [Warhol, New York: Ecco, 2020].
In the summer and fall of 1952, the same year as his first solo show at the Hugo Gallery, Warhol sent Fenn a series of doctored Museum of Modern Art postcards featuring a still from the 1936 Greta Garbo melodrama Camille, in which she and Robert Taylor are poised for a kiss. Warhol added speech bubbles filled with phrases clipped at random from a French textbook—a representative exchange has Taylor saying “the orange is round” and Garbo responding “here is an orange”—and, on one card, a typewritten cat’s meow.
Purchased by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller from Fenn’s longtime partner John Krug, the postcards are inflected with a pre-Pop Pop sensibility—a convergence of avant-garde and popular culture—very much in line with Warhol’s work from that stage of his career. Although they are all unsigned, they are identical to a signed card in the collection of Richard Prince. Furthermore, all of the typewritten additions lack capital letters, following Warhol’s practice at the time, and the postcard of October 8, 1952, is franked with a stamp from the Lenox Hill Post Office, which is in line with his contemporaneous residence on 75th Street. Finally, Warhol saved about 20 blank Camille postcards with no addressee or message inside a paper envelope. They are currently in the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh along with an example of a “meow” postcard intended as a Christmas greeting to Truman Capote and his mother (it was never sent and now lives in one of the “Time Capsules” at the museum). It is nearly identical to the Fenn postcards: the message is typed with no capital letters vertically along the right side, and the typefaces match.
The figure of Garbo, who was described by Susan Sontag over a decade later as “the great serious idol of camp taste” [“Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review (Fall 1964)], was not chosen at random. As Gopnik points out, around the same time, Warhol got his friend George Klauber to photograph him in the famous hands-on-head pose of Garbo and based drawings of men in drag on photos by Fenn—including some of Fenn himself, mugging in furs in a Lord & Taylor’s store window. He even goes so far as to suggest creditably in an endnote that the Camille postcards may have inspired “their mostly gay crowd to produce an all-male version of the film, shot the following year by friends on Fire Island as a lark. . . . It was shot in luscious color and with surprisingly high production values; the Fenn circle had mainstream skill-sets and tastes that were quite unlike Warhol’s 1960s encounters with truly underground filmmakers.”
This camp aesthetic—not to mention Warhol’s commercial work, often punctuated by angels, cupids, butterflies, and flowers and accompanied by the swirly, handwritten script of his mother—ran counter to the hyper-masculinity that defined both Madison Avenue and Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. In POPism [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980], Warhol recalls a conversation with the filmmaker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty found being accepted socially. In response, Warhol offered, “There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I ‘should’ want to change. . . . Other people could change their attitudes but not me.” Many critics since have turned to this period as a key moment in the development of the Warhol persona that would take the art world by storm in the 1960s and 1970s. Confirmation, in the words of one of his Garbos, that “un jour il sera un homme.”