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Andy Warhol's Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2001 by Blake Stimson
This interest was not drawn solely from Warhol's role as a latter-day observer of the political passions of the prior generation. Sometime in late 1947 or early 1948, Warhol and many of the other students in his class reportedly signed a petition supporting Henry A. Wallace's third-party bid for candidacy in the upcoming presidential election. Warhol was undoubtedly influenced by peers like Philip Pearlstein, and he may have been swayed by the examples set by prominent artists like Ben Shahn who had made public displays of their support for Wallace. He may have signed the petition following Wallace's speech at Carnegie Tech in November 1947 or following a pro-Wallace rally on March 1,1948, at Carnegie, which was upended by several hundred anti-Wallace protesters from neighboring Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh dressed in red or red and white underwear and with some sporting Stalin-like mustaches shouting, "Comrades! On to Helsinki!" (92) In any case the decision to sign the petition was c harged with the suspicion of Communist sympathy by many in Pittsburgh. In one of the most notorious examples of pre-McCarthy period Red-baiting, the Pittsburgh Press published the names of all those in western Pennsylvania who had signed the petition to put Wallace on the ballot in April 1948. When Warhol's name showed up on the list, it reportedly came as a shock to his family. (93)
The core dramatic tension in All the King's Men, the conflict between political idealism and political cynicism, is figured across three different registers in Warhol's drawing: in the ambivalence between the forceful hand and the confused eyes of the Stark character, in the contrast between the stylistic influences of Ben Shahn and Aubrey Beardsley, and in the juxtaposition of the figures of Lenin and Tiny Duffy. While Warhol does illustrate the central theme of Warren's novel, he also alters the experience of the story by shifting the locus of narrative tension. Where the reader of Warren's novel experiences shock, guilt, hope, despair, and finally euphoria as he or she identifies with Burden's burden and his release from it, the viewer of Warhol's drawing looks at Burden with analytic distance as someone in the thrall of group hysteria and, therefore, is held back from such an identification. This shift of focus is accentuated in the drawing by the use of the heavy, assertive Shahn line to emphasize the th ree figures in the crowd that surround Burden but not in the figure of Burden himself, who seems to dissipate into the background despite his prominent location in the composition. In place of such an identification with the protagonist-cum-narrator-cum-author of the novel we are asked to stand back and observe the scene with critical detachment, like the three figures in the back row.
One likely response to the novel in the wake of the war would have been to identify with disaffected fellow traveler Jack Burden. This is the response that the book calls for, as we learn at the end that Burden, the narrator, and the author are all one and the same. Disaffection of this sort, however, is a class-bound response, a privilege for those who have faith that regardless of what they do or what decisions they make, they will be able to make it in the world one way or another. Andy Warhol, who came from an immigrant, working-class family in Pittsburgh and was raised during the Depression and war years, in all likelihood did not share that confidence. Jack Burden, with his privileged Southern-genteel upbringing in the 1920s and failed bourgeois illusions, would thus be an unlikely character for Warhol to identify with. This is borne out by Warhol's cool, deliberative pose in the drawing; it displays none of the sympathy for Burden and his story that is a central component of Warren's novel.
