While studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, he met Philip Pearlstein, a well-known American painter of nudes, and spent a lot of time with him. His teachers do not remember anything remarkable about the young student. Robert Lepper, who, according to Pearlstein, was “the only really good teacher” at the Carnegie Institute recalls that Warhol was a skinny little boy whom he did not know particularly well; but he said Warhol did his work and some of it really was very good. Though Pittsburgh was provincial it enjoyed a lively political and cultural scene. Philip Pearlstein remembers Andy Warhol’s interest in dance, and in artists such as the American dancer, who was a kind of hero in the cultural scene back then; Pearlstein remembers that he and Warhol always went to his performances. He also remembers Martha Graham’s troupe, and her special technique. He thought that in some ways Martha Graham was like Bertolt Brecht; they had heard of Brecht’s theory and technique of epic theatre and of the alienation effect. Warhol finished his studies with a B.A. in Fine Arts and soon after left Pittsburgh. His student years were over. His move to New York marked the beginning of his years of traveling. He shared a studio with Pearlstein at St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side, home of many of the has-beens of the New York literature and music scenes (later, in the Eighties, to become the home of Graffiti). “When I was eighteen a friend stuffed me into a Kroger’s shopping bag and took me to New York,” was Warhol’s laconic comment on this decisive step (according to Rainer Crone, he was 21 at the time). For Europeans, New York—the noisy metropolis with its electrifying atmosphere and hectic lifestyle—is synonymous with America. Although Eugene Rosenstock-Huesy, philosopher and sociologist sneeringly remarks that few Americans would be interested if it were destroyed by an atom bomb, for Warhol, son of immigrants from central Europe, New York became the apotheosis of all his desires: Fifth Avenue with its elegant shops, Madison Avenue, center of advertising and the El Dorado of the commercial arts, Park Avenue with its exclusive apartment blocks.
Martha Graham: Letter to the World (The Kick),1986 printed in colors on Lenox Museum Board 36 x 36in
Satyric Festival Song, Martha Graham1&2,1986 Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board 39 x 40in
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First Pop Star of the Art World