Elvis Presley and Warhol's Fascination with the Cult of Celebrity
“I thought that the way to finish off painting for me would be to have a painting that floats, so I invented the floating silver rectangles that you fill up with helium and let out of your windows.”
A gleaming visionary force, Andy Warhol's Elvis embodies the artist's singular ability to appropriate and manipulate familiar imagery to examine greater cultural currents and moments. Inspired by a publicity shot, Elvis Presley is adorned with a gunslinger for the western film Flaming Star and stands life-size, striking a pose that is instantly recognizable against the silver screen. Shimmering, the silver ground encapsulates the glistening brilliance of Hollywood, distinguished in Elvis by the exceptional silkscreen technique against the surface. In the summer of 1963, Andy Warhol was thirty-four years old and, having perfected his silkscreen technique the previous year, was beginning to transform the landscape of visual culture in America. Appropriating the visual vernacular of consumerism, Warhol levelled his silkscreen at subjects he perceived as the most important concerns of contemporary life: icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and, of course, Elvis Presley. Elvis was the ultimate subject for Warhol to explore popular culture and fame, a figure whose fame and image dominated the cultural zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s. Multiplying readymade images of these icons gleaned from newspapers, magazines and advertising, Warhol turned a mirror onto the contradictions of quotidian existence. With a playful theatricality and painterly illusionistic rendering of space, Elvis typifies Warhol's career-long fascination with the immortality of celebrity and popular culture.
Through Elvis, Warhol deftly examines his fascination with celebrity, the glamour of the silver screen and American idealism, depicting the glamorized lone cowboy and frontier. The source of the present image of Elvis has been identified as coming from a color postcard of Presley posing as a gunslinger for the western film Flaming Star. Warhol was undoubtedly drawn to Elvis' impressive trinity of fame – musician, actor, sex symbol – and he accentuates this by choosing a manifestly contrived version of Elvis-the-film-star rather than the raw genius of Elvis as a performing Rock n' Roll pioneer. With Elvis, we are confronted with an iconic figure that is deeply familiar to us, yet, one playing a role relating to violence and death that is entirely at odds with the associations of the singer's renowned love songs. Warhol's depiction of Elvis here displays not so much his ambition to record a physical likeness but more his love affair with the glamour of celebrity and the drama of violence. In this context, Elvis becomes an extraordinary embodiment of the two artistic obsessions: the cult of celebrity and the shadow of tragedy. Warhol interrogates the limits of the popular visual vernacular, posing vital questions of collects ive perception and cognition in contemporary society.
"The most insistent question posed by the Elvis series concerns the nature of their specifically charged content, and the viewing of Warhol's imagery not as signs, but as icons dealing with a larger content of culture in America. Presley has long been a folk hero to a large group of Americans, yet his musical impact has overshadowed his sociological significance. Presley's importance is not simply as a popular entertainer but as a bearer of new verities."
Warhol’s Elvis Paintings in Institutional collects ions
An icon and legend of his t.mes , Elvis Presley was twenty-eight years old in 1963 and a cultural phenomenon, having already recorded seventeen number one singles and seven number one albums, starred in eleven films, and grossed tens of millions of dollars. An instantly recognizable figure around the globe, Elvis presented a perfect subject for Warhol. Executed in 1963, Elvis captures the undisputed King of Rock and Roll with devastating intimacy and efficiency, rendered on a physically larger scale than life. Here we are not only presented with the legendary Elvis but confronted with the spectre of death, staring at us down the barrel of a gun, the character of the lone cowboy, straddling the great frontier and the American dream, epitomizing the glorified glamour of the "silver screen." As with Marilyn, Liz and Marlon Brando, Warhol instinctively understood Elvis as not only a celebrity, but a brand: an industrialized construct, designed for mass consumption not unlike a Coca-Cola bottle or Campbell's Soup Can, and exposed that brand as a precisely composed non-reality. Warhol's signature silkscreen technique is mastered in the present work, and the figure is distinguished by the crisp rendering against the silver plane.
Elvis was executed shortly after he had created 32 Campbell's Soup Cans for his immortal show at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in July and August 1962, and which is now housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In the intervening period, he had produced the series Dollar Bills, Coca-Cola Bottles, Suicides, Disasters, and Silver Electric Chairs, all in addition to the portrait cycles of Marilyn and Liz. This explosive outpouring of astonishing artistic invention stands as a definitive test.mes nt to Warhol's aptitude to seize the most potent images of his t.mes . For Warhol, the act of image replication and multiplication anaesthetized the effect of the subject, and while he had undermined the potency of wealth in 200 One Dollar Bills, and cheated the terror of death by electric chair in Silver Disaster # 6, the proliferation of Elvis here emasculates a prefabricated version of character authenticity. Here the cinematic quality of the screen floating in space, displaced from any sense of narrative, becomes a mesmerizing manifestation of the cinematic archetype.
"He was one of the most serious and one of the most important, artists of the twentieth century, [Andy Warhol] quite simply changed how we see all the world around us. He had an uncanny ability to select precise images that still have great resonance today."
The self-reflective artificiality of the present work is compounded by Warhol's usage of a silver surface on which to project his subject, a treatment that he reserved for his most celebrated muses: Liz, Marilyn, Jackie, and Elvis. Under Warhol's directive, Elvis becomes a symbol of the manufacture of the Elvis product and at the same t.mes denotes the glamor of the silver screen and the fantasies of cinema. Elvis presents the culmination of Warhol's unprecedented creative journey to this point of his career, both summation of what had come before and an anticipatory touchstone for the artistic landmarks that would follow. Its sublime aesthetic character attests to the technical mastery of the silkscreening technique that he had achieved by this t.mes . This technique was ideally suited to Warhol's aim to distance himself from the painterly process: the regimented dots of the screen here are crisply registered on the flat silver picture plane, divesting the work of an artistic hand or authorial voice. The movie star countenance is reduced to a prefabricated schema of dots, and by faithfully reproducing the alien aesthetic of a found image Warhol recruits the technical process to query issues of authorship and authenticity.
As composer Leonard Bernstein described, "He introduced the beat to everything, and he changed everything—music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution—the sixties came from it" (Leonard Bernstein quoted in Pamela Clarke Keogh, Elvis Presley: The Man, The Life, The Legend, New York, 2004, p. 2) Both Elvis and Warhol defied convention and revolutionized the cultural landscape of their t.mes , and Warhol's esteemed corpus of Elvis paintings comprises a major milestone in Warhol's journey to superstardom. Warhol's manufactured persona was reflective of the world around him, just as in the present work, Elvis, life-size in silver paint, becomes reflective of the constructed social conventions of Hollywood and the immeasurable effect of Elvis on culture in the 1950s and 1960s. A star and icon in his lifet.mes , even Elvis's tragic early passing in 1977 did not diminish the enduring significance of his personality, a remarkable foresight by Andy Warhol. Warhol's unprecedented practice re-presented how the public viewed Elvis and how society viewed itself, simultaneously reinforcing and radically undermining the collects ive psychology of popular culture. Elvis harnesses an urgent power that still defines the foundations of western popular culture: the birth of cool, Rock n' Roll and unashamed sex appeal.
