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

(75.) See, for example, Bright Eyes (1934), Little Miss Marker (1934), Curly Top (1935), Captain January (1935), and Poor Little Rich Girl (1936).

(76.) The 1935 hit Captain January, for example, included a dance number that originally presented Temple as "a nubile island maiden" complete with "hula skirt and brassiere of slippery seaweed fronds." When the film was previewed by reviewers from the Mothers Clubs of America, who "gasped in horror," the scene was quickly rewritten and refilmed with trousers and no fronds. Perhaps the most fantastic moment of interest in Temple piqued by such category confusion occurred when, after reports in British tabloids suggested that the child star was no child at all but instead a thirty-year-old midget, the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, dispatched a church prelate all the way from Rome to investigate. Black (as in n. 18), 128, 184.

(77.) Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Bret Wood, "Lolita Syndrome," Sight and Sound 4 (June 1994): 34.

(78.) In the context of discussion about and development of the welfare state, all three functioned critically and ideologically. "So strongly overdetermined is Shirley's capacity for love," Eckert argues, "that she virtually exists within it [with] no id, ego or superego. She is unstructured reification of the libido." Eckert goes on to discuss various ways in which Temple's image of unrestricted generosity was consistent with the New Deal liberal ideology of compassion. "Shirley's acts of softening, interceding and the rest are spontaneous ones, originating in her love of others. Not only do they function as condensations of all the mid-depression schemes for the care of the needy, but they repress the concept of duty to give or of a responsibility to share (income tax, federal spending).... Shirley and her burden of love appeared at a moment when the official ideology of charity had reached a final and unyielding form and when the public sources of charitable support were drying up"; Eckert, 45, 47.

(79.) This gesture, as it is depicted in Warhol's drawing, has been repeatedly interpreted as a Nazi salute and the meaning of Warhol's drawing limited to a comparison between Willie Stark/Huey Long and Nazis. (See, for example, Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the Artist [New York: Rizzoli, 1986].) While certainly the association would have been a very strong one in 1948, to limit the meaning of the drawing to this does not adequately account for the ambivalence of the character in the story or in the drawing, nor does it account for the emergence of Soviet Communism as a replacement evil for the defeated Nazis.

(80.) Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 13.

(81.) If we look at Warhol's career as a whole, he appears to be a self-portraitist perhaps more than any other artist in history. All his early successes involved self-portraits. A sophomore-year exhibition of drawings of daily life in the Pittsburgh slums that gained him recognition and kept him from flunking out of Carnegie Tech included a prominently placed, oversize self-portrait. His first succes de scandale was a painting often referred to as Nosepicker but whose full title is The Broad Gave Me My Face but I Can Pick My Own Nose. And the card announcing the 1962 exhibition at the Stable Gallery that launched his career as a fine artist in New York was a self-portrait. Throughout the remainder of his career he would pose for thousands of self-portraits, society photographs, promotional photographs, and photographs recording life at the Factory. In many he would pose alongside other public figures--Marilyn, Elvis, the pope, Mickey Mouse, and so on. This tendency to picture himself generally and to pictur e himself specifically in the context of celebrity is fully consistent with his career as a whole and with the widely agreed on assumption that his persona was one of his greatest artistic accomplishments.