Andy Warhol: Redesign

life from a distance, he saw it with the eye of a strang-
The story of his rise to fame is dotted with anecdotes.
“
HE OBSERVED THIS
er who notices things which the New Yorker takes for
granted. He first started working as a professional graphic
Calvin Tomkins, art critic, tells us how Tina Fredricks,
then art director of Glamour, contributed to them. She
LIFE FROM A DISTANCE,
HE SAW IT WITH THE
EYE OF A STRANGER...
”
designer, creating advertisements for fashion magazines
like Glamour, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and this was
when he changed his name to Andy Warhol. Several
times, he changed apartments and studios looking for
friends. “I kept living with roommates thinking we could
become good friends and share problems, but I’d always
find out that they were just interested in another person
was thrilled by Andy’s drawings but could not find a commercial
use for them. She told him that the drawings were
good, but that Glamour could only use drawings of shoes
at the moment. The next day Warhol came back with 50
drawings of shoes in his brown paper bag. No one had
ever drawn shoes the way he did.
Footwear was to be a recurring theme in his work
23
sharing the rent.” His success came relatively quickly and
up to the early Sixties and many see this as the most im-
the “American Dream” of unstoppable success came true
portant era of his commercial phase. Tomkins praises the
faster than he had expected.
subtlety of these drawings which were done in the style of
Toulouse-Lautrec and admires their empirical exactness.
“Each buckle was in the right place.” His creative series,