Ellen Lupton

Edited extract from a phone conversation between Nicholas Chambers and Ellen Lupton, April 2017.

Nicholas: I’m speaking on the phone with Ellen Lupton, senior curator at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. We have been emailing about Andy and the Adman exhibition for almost a year now, but this is the first time we’ve actually spoken. It’s great to be able to have this conversation with you.

Ellen: Absolutely!

Nicholas: You wrote a piece for the Adman book and one of the reasons I was so keen to have you involved in the project is that you also contributed an important essay to Donna de Salvo’s Success is a job in New York, a catalogue published in 1989 to accompany what was really the first major exhibition looking at Warhol’s pre-pop practice. What was it was like returning to Andy 30 years later?

Ellen: (laughs) So I wrote that first piece about Andy Warhol’s early commercial art when I was very young. I was in my 20s. It was wonderful coming back to his work so many years later and, of course, this time I was really focused on his mother, Julia Warhola. It was exciting to me to find out who she was, and to learn that when she moved to New York to live with Andy she was 50. And now I’m 53. So I feel a great affinity, coming back as a woman the age of Andy Warhol’s mother, to kind of give tribute to her, as a creative person in her own way. I really enjoyed taking the time to honour her in this piece.

Nicholas: Could I ask you to set the scene for us? How was it that Julia Warhola ended up living with Andy and becoming his first art assistant?

Ellen: She was a widow, and after Andy moved to New York in 1949, she followed a couple of years later and lived with him until just before she died [in 1972]. She was intimately involved with his studio and assistants and, as I discuss in the essay, she famously contributed the script which became a feature of his commercial work.

Nicholas: One of the things I find most striking about Warhol’s commercial work is that it seems quite out of step with mainstream approaches to advertising imagery in the 1950s.

Ellen: There were different modes or streams of advertising work in the 1950s.

There would be very traditional, sort of old-school advertising that was very copy heavy, with either photographs or traditional photo-like illustrations and very ordinary type. And that would be your mainstream advertising, the ads you would primarily see in a magazine like Life or Lady’s Home Journal.

Then there was progressive photo-based advertising that was really at the cutting edge and the vanguard; your Doyle Dane Bernbach kind of stuff that had a high concept and was very sophisticated.

And somewhere else lay this artistic, handmade approach of people like Andy Warhol or Ben Shahn, who became known as illustrators who brought their own individual, art-world-influenced style to advertising. Warhol definitely falls into that area, and one of the things that makes his works distinctive is the coordination of the lettering style of Julia Warhola with his drawing style. It’s quite remarkable. She has penmanship and her lettering is very disciplined, but in a childlike way. It’s also very elegant, and has wonderful curlicues and flourishes. It’s not raw. It is quite deliberate and careful, and feminine.

Nicholas: It was known in the industry that Julia was responsible for the script in Andy’s work and, in fact, at one point a graphic art award, received by Warhol, is made out to ‘Andy Warhol’s Mother’.

Ellen: That was for ‘The story of Moondog’, a record cover that featured a long poem, and the graphic designer who did the cover commissioned the Warhol studio to do the lettering. Julia Warhola did it in her familiar, wonderful style of handwriting. Presumably, she kind of wrote it out in pieces, and the designer of the record company then put them together, and added colour to it, and turned what she did into a very nice composition. And he gave her credit for doing the lettering which reads: lettering by Andy Warhol’s Mother. It’s charming, and in a way she got credit, but in a way she didn’t: she’s just a woman behind a famous man, who really has no name of her own – she’s just ‘Andy Warhol’s Mother’. And I’m very happy that in your exhibition, she comes forward as a creative person.