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

(27.) Ben Shahn, "If I Had to Begin My Art Career Today," from an art school student symposium. Andover, Mass., Sept. 15, 1949, excerpted in John D. Morse, ed., Ben Shahn (New York: Praeger, 1972), 94-95.

(28.) Pohl (as in n. 23), 5.

(29.) Ibid., 3.

(30.) Diego Rivera (as in n. 11).

(31.) One fellow student reports that Lepper's course was a particularly crucial influence on Warhol's artistic development. See Bockris, 43.

(32.) Robert Lepper, "Processes in Professor Lepper's Courses in Pictorial Design," Department of Painting and Design. ts, Aug. 1948, Lepper archive, box 2, ff. 57, 1.

(33.) Ibid., 3-5.

(34.) Ibid., 6.

(35.) Ibid.

(36.) Lepper had previously assigned several different novels, all of which focus on a single male protagonist struggling to find his way in a rapidly changing world. These included Ernest Hemingway's 1940 account of an American volunteer with the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls, James T. Farrell's 1932 story about the plight of a youth amid Depression-era urban squalor, Young Lonigan, and Theodore Dreisers 1925 study of the moral and psychological repercussions of market-driven values in An American Tragedy. The particular novel chosen for Warhol's class and illustrated in Warhol's drawing, Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winner All the King's Men, was, like the others, a story about coming of age in very specific, very modern social and historical circumstances.

(37.) The Share Our Wealth society called for a radical redistribution of wealth, with a platform that included a minimum family income, a cap on the wealth any individual could accumulate, a federal pension plan, a limited workweek, and equal opportunity in education for all. For a recent assessment of the (substantial) influence of the Share Our Wealth society on the New Deal, see Edwin Amenta, Kathleen Dunleavy, and Mary Bernstein. "Huey Long's 'Share Our Wealth' and the Second New Deal," American Sociological Review 59 (Oct. 1994): 678-90.

(38.) See Caute (as in n. 8).

(39.) The novel met with great critical success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for 1947, and it was made into a movie by King Vidor in 1949, which, in turn, won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Broderick Crawford).

(40.) Nan Rosenthal notes that "Moholy's New Bauhaus, or Institute of Design in Chicago, was fashionable, in the sense of hip ... in the 1940s. Aspiring artists knew about it the way they knew about Cal Arts in the early 1970s or Yale in the 1960s"; Rosenthal, "Let Us Nose Praise Famous Men: Warhol as Art Director," in The Work of Andy Warhal, ed. Gary Garrels (Seattie: Bay Press, 1989), 40. See also David Deitcher's excellent essay "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist": "the transformation of art, design, and their instruction in America ... [in] the 1930s and 1940s ... by Bauhaus teaching, aimed at a practically Hegelian transformation of art and design.... Pop artists ... experienced a unique, transitory moment in the history of American art instruction, when a singularly rational approach to teaching unprecedented numbers of students the skills of pictortal organization and commercial design seas united with a still romantic belief in the inherent beneficence of art and science"; Deitcher, in Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-62, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992, 115-16.