Zelda is a fund of arcane information on one of her favourite subjects Art!
GOLDEN SLIPPERS
ZELDA MARGO
I was sick a lot as a child. I had three nervous breakdowns. I lost my hair and my hands
shook. I was terrified of socialising. I retreated into movie magazines. Always images
rather than words.
He had this infatuation with celebrity. He sent fan letters to Truman Capote.
He would stand outside the building where I lived waiting to see me. My loopy mother
invited him upstairs to our apartment.
I also live with my mother and twenty-five cats. As soon as I made a few dollars, I
brought my mother to New York. She wrote a book called Holy Cats.
This book was strange. Campy and privately printed.
Truman Capote thought him the loneliest, most friendless person. Just a hopeless loser.
A loser who was a great voyeur. He spoke little and saw much. He just watched and
watched all the time. A sponge for everything. A curious character with shaggy-silver
soft-metallic hair and wasted pallor. Reticent; shy, masking an incredible intelligence. An
ability to see things as they are quickly. He looked like an intelligent white rabbit wearing
glasses.
This rabbit had a talent for real beauty of line and composition. There was no one round
then who worked quite that way.
Serendipity, a coffee shop on East 58th Street, also sold knick-knacks. It was a mecca for
celebrities. He brought a whole portfolio of water-coloured shoe drawings which he
called A LA RÊCHERCHÉ DU SHOE PERDU.
In 1956 he had a breakthrough with his Crazy Golden Slipper show at the Bodley
Gallery. Each shoe was given the name of a celebrity, and Life magazine gave it a
double page spread.
From a commercial illustrator to a phenomena with gallery owners. He understood the
power of a sign simple, clear. He was the one who understood it best and became
best know for understanding it. What he extracted from mass culture was repetition. He
loved the inert sameness of the mass product.
An infinite series of identical objects soup cans, coke bottles, dollar bills. The same
head of Marilyn Monroe silk screened over and over again. His grungy view of reality. He
wanted it glanced at like a TV screen, not scanned like a painting.
Television in the 60s was morally numb, haunted by death and disposed to treat all
events as spectacle. The condition of being an uninvolved spectator is shown in his
disaster paintings. He gave us one piercing insight about the nature and effect of media.
Andy Warhol, originally Warhola, the Czech-American filled the role brilliantly, but did he
cramp his capabilities as a formal artist? Will his achievement eventually be seen to lie in
the sociology of art rather than the domain of painting itself? He turned the art world into
the art business, but certainly had more than fifteen minutes of fame, this enfant terrible
of Pop Art.
§