Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016

This article explores Andy Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series of the 1970s. It outlines the history of its production, and examines the place of politics, especially communism, within Warhol’s drawings, paintings and photographs. Most commentary on the Hammer and Sickle series has emphasized the power of the symbol in the United States, but this article explores the value of reading Warhol’s series as ‘European’.

This article explores Warhol and Nico’s relationship with Europe through their formative years and subsequent collaboration in Warhol’s underground and experimental filmmaking. In the 1950s Warhol was a commercial artist in New York, circulating in a gay milieu, and his work often conveyed Europe and a European sensibility in its illustration of ‘all things Europe’, but especially fashion. Nico was a fashion model and frequently seen in European fashion magazines before landing a few film roles, including a small part in La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960) and a featuring role in the French erotic film Strip-Tease (Poitrenaud, 1962). Nico moved to New York and found her way to Warhol’s art studio and social scene known as The Factory. At The Factory Nico joined the art-rock group The Velvet Underground at Warhol’s insistence and featured in several films Warhol made between 1966 and 1967, including Chelsea Girls (Warhol, 1966) and a number of portrait films called Screen Tests (Warhol, 1964–1966). This article explores the presence and negotiation of Europe in both Nico’s and Warhol’s life and work in the 1950s and 1960s. The article pays particular attention to their early careers and the shifts in Nico’s persona demonstrated by the difference between the French Strip-Tease and Warhol’s experimental Screen Tests.

The illustrious careers of Yves Saint Laurent and Andy Warhol intersect in revealing ways: Warhol started out as a graphic artist working in fashion advertising, celebrated for his illustrations and department store windows, but longed to be recognized as a famous artist; Saint Laurent, who so admired literature, painting and opera, felt his talent was squandered on the business of fashion and coveted the prestige of the fine arts. But while the YSL brand invested heavily in the artistic persona of the couturier as rooted in a form of decadent nostalgia, Warhol’s persona simply represented the present like no other personality of the period, casting his critical gaze over the workings of mass-media culture, actively shaping his own legend as the recorder of surfaces. With the rise in the 1960s of Saint Laurent’s popular ready-to-wear line and subsequent global licencing agreements, Pop art overlapped with consumer fashion, sharing similar preoccupations such as serial repetition and mass diffusion. This article investigates the impact of Warhol’s wide-ranging enquiry into media representation on the career, image and persona of one of France’s most illustrious and glamorous designers of the later twentieth century. It does this by drawing on a number of contemporary film dramatizations and documentary portraits of Saint Laurent’s life including the recent biopics Yves Saint Laurent (Lespert, 2014) and Saint Laurent (Bonello, 2014), both of which read the subject through the lens of celebrity culture.

ENCHANTING DAVID BOWIE: SPACE, TIME, BODY, MEMORY, TOIJA CINQUE AND SEAN REDMOND (EDS) (2015) 1st ed., Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 368 pp., ISBN: 9781628923056, p/bk, 23.99 Stg

NEW WAVE: IMAGE IS EVERYTHING, MATTHEW KING ADKINS (2015) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 157 pp., ISBN: 9781137363541, h/bk, $100; ISBN: 9781349473045, p/bk, $95