Andy Warhol's Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol

By late 1948 or early 1949, on the eve of the McCarthy era, Communism and anti-Communism had become mainstays for the popular media. The major weeklies indulged in Red-baiting in almost every issue with debates that extended over several weeks on such topics as whether Communism should be outlawed or whether Communists should be permitted to teach (in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times Magazine, for example). Caricatures of "typical" Communists and fellow travelers and prominent Communist leaders were also popular, as in such articles as "What Is a Communist? How Can You Spot Him?" in the New York Times Magazine (84) and Life's hugely popular "Portrait of an American Communist." (85) In this climate, the myth of Lenin as engineer of the evil Communist regime was renewed with a vengeance. His bald head, hollow cheeks, piercing gaze, mustache and goatee, and tie were all components of his popular iconography. In an unsigned report titled "Foreign News," for example, Time magazine described him in late 1947 as "a stooped man with hollow cheeks and a potbelly who ["always" wore "neckties," and] came out from behind the book stacks where he had spent most of his life, and kidnapped a state." (86)

There was also a tremendously successful mass-circulation biography of Lenin published in early 1948 that raised the specter of Lenin's political afterlife by being promoted as "A fascinating biography of a man who, from his grave, directs the strategy of the Kremlin today." (87) This was a time, immediately after the war and on the cusp of McCarthyism, when mass politics was being repudiated on all fronts and populists like Huey Long and Father Coughlin, Fascists like Mussolini, Nazis like Hitler, and Bolsheviks like Stalin and Lenin were all being lumped together. Despite the tremendous differences in their political outlooks and agendas, the ongoing development of Lenin's Communism was a readily available parallel to Huey Long's Share Our Wealth platform for an audience at the time. So, too, the character of Jack Burden would have been a ready-made model of the fellow-traveling artists and intellectuals of the 1930s.

Throughout his career, Robert Lepper repeatedly insisted, we must expect the arts of our time to sense and reflect the present social order." (88) To do so, however, was never simply a matter of commenting on current events: instead, he specified in 1948, the student artists are "asked to examine a 'total environment"' in order to become "more conscious of the intricate interrelations of its components." (89) The artist's goal was to articulate his work in such a way that it demonstrated complex understanding of historical and social forces--"geo-graphic location, economic resources, occupations, cultural interests, traditional ties,... social, group and sectional prejudices and the like." (90) Robert Penn Warren's depiction of Huey Long and the character of Jack Burden in the context of Lenin's Communism and the artists and intellectuals of the 1930s would have been a likely--really, inevitable--topic of conversation for Lepper's classroom during the half year that Warhol and his classmates worked on the nov el. Whether he did so on his own initiative or under the influence of Lepper and/or his classmates, Warhol seems to have drawn that parallel between Lenin's class-based populism and Huey Long's by incorporating a caricature of Lenin into his drawing. At the very least, such a parallel would have been an appropriate and convenient solution to the demand for historical consciousness that was the driving force behind Lepper's assignment. From our perspective, looking back on Warhol's career as a whole, this parallel is also consistent with his recurring and long-standing interest in Communist themes manifest in many of his works, not the least of them being his Lenin series and exhibition of 1986 (Fig. 11). (91)