Cousin Andy

courtesy, MOCA

Clara Sturak
Associate editor

   My father and I made a family visit recently, to see a long lost cousin, the man whose fame or, more precisely, notoriety, had been the topic of conversations at countless family get-togethers, and even led to a few memorable arguments. The one-and-only name I could drop as a lowly scholarship student at a private school for children of the rich and famous. An artist whose legend loomed large in and outside of our family – who, when approached by my sister, at the time a waitress at New York’s Four Seasons, asked her to go take a picture of Barbra Streisand, because he was too star-struck to do it himself.
Cousin Andy.
   Yes, Andy Warhol is my father’s first cousin. Or, as my grandmother was fond of saying, “Mrs. Warhola was a Zavacky.” Upon close inspection of the family tree, it seems that I am related to Andy Warhol through both my fraternal grandmother and fraternal grandfather (they all came from the same tiny village in eastern Slovakia, after all…)
   The Warholas, like the Sturaks, Sluks, Shacks and Zavackys, were villagers in the Sub-Carpathian Rus region of eastern Europe – right where Eastern Slovakia, Southern Poland and the Western Ukraine meet. Dismally poor (legend has it my great-grandfather ate only carrots for the first 11 years of his life), they, like thousands of others, made the great trip to America, land of milk and honey.
   Love him or hate him – and the older generation of my extended family certainly hated him in the 70s when he was making those six-hour home movies and giving “our people” a bad name – Andy Warhol is probably the most fantabulous example of what happens when the American dream comes true.
Horatio Alger, eat your heart out.
   When we arrived for our special semi-private viewing of MOCA’s Andy Warhol retrospective, I proudly introduced my father to the museum’s public relations woman as “Andy Warhol’s cousin.” My father, just about as shy as Warhol famously was, kept his eyes to the ground and mumbled hello as he shook her hand.
   His demeanor changed, though, when we began our walk through the exhibit. “This is neat,” he said about Warhol’s “Water Heater,” a 1960 black and white painting of a newspaper advertisement for a water heater. (Neat, being the adjective of wild approval favored by my dad.) He kept a sly smile on his face for the remainder of our time there.
   When we arrived at what was to be the first of many manifestations of Campbell’s soup cans, this one a representation of Cream of Chicken, my father said, “Oh, that’s straight from Lipschultz’ Market.”
   Lipschultz Market, he explained to me, sat at the end of Beelan Street, one of the many streets on the hills overlooking Pittsburgh’s steel mills, part of a multi-ethnic slum that from street to street went from German to Polish to Hungarian to Slovakian, to eventually, highest up, African-American. In an ironic twist brought on by practicality, the lower on the totem pole your “people” were, the higher on the hill you lived – since it meant a longer walk down to the mills and home again.
   The Shacks and the Sturaks shared a house on Beelan Street, and the Warholas lived there, too. Andy, my father said, would be sent down to the corner to Lipschultz’s place by his mother to pick up Campbell’s Soup, and any other canned American convenience food. “None of them were cooks,” he told me, “except Grandma Shack.” Lipschultz, he added, either due to lack of capital or out of a strange neatness, kept only a few cans of each item, and lined them up perfectly on his shelves. “Right out of Lipschultz,” he said again.
   Art historians and critics would likely scoff at my father’s reminiscence as overly simplistic and based on a fuzzy nostalgia, but aren’t, by now, all stories about Warhol just that – stories? So many of them made up by the man himself?
   He may have been the first “queer” artist to bravely expose his inner truth, even in his earliest self portraits, as a New York Times critic recently pronounced, but he was also little Andy Warhola, son of an assembly worker, youngest brother of two towering bullies my father characterizes as “thugs,” a child so sickly that he wasn’t able to leave his bed for months at a time. Diagnosed with Chorea, or St. Vitus’ Dance, he worried his mother to half to death.
   Called “Coffee Nerves Warhola” by my father’s favorite aunt, he was named such because of behavior so twitchy and strange that she and her pals would tie him to a chair while babysitting just to keep him under control.
   It’s a good story, but also, can’t you just see it? Doesn’t it make a lot of sense? As a gift to her sickly son, Julia Warhola bought him a film projector, and, according to Antje Dallmann writing in the MOCA catalogue, he would sit by himself for hours, watching the same short cartoons over and over again. At around this time he became enamored of Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and other child stars, to whom he would write, asking for pictures and autographs.
   My father’s primary memory of Andy was of being told by his grandmother to visit the boy, sick at home with no companionship. “I’d go,” my father said, “but I didn’t really like it. We’d just sort of sit in the same room and draw together. I don’t think he really wanted me there.”
   It was wartime, and my father remembers showing little Andy a characture of Hitler that he drew. “Andy really loved that picture. I should have gotten him to sign it – if I only knew!” Actually, he should have grabbed a pile of Andy’s drawings of Shirley Temple and made for a safe deposit box, but they were just kids – both small, shy and awkward – cousins, not even friends, sitting there drawing passing the time, until one could be freed from the other.
   Along with his place as PopArt’s father, Studio 54’s mascot, and Peter Pan to his Factory of Lost Boys and Girls, years after his death Warhol has an additional kind of fame. He, second only to Albert Einstein, is prominently featured as a token celebrity on half-a-dozen websites dedicated to Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. It turns out that what poor Julia Warhola though was St.Vitus’ Dance, and the teenage Mecca Sturak called coffee nerves, was likely the stereotypical gesturing that often comes along with these developmental disabilities.
   Combine those traits with his legendary shyness, his inability to make eye-contact, his chronic use of a camera to put a lens between himself and the outside world, and it starts to make sense. Add to that his singular, obsessive, vision – his working and re-working of intricate patterns – because one Jackie O or Marilyn or can of soup just wasn’t enough – and it’s hard to deny that the Autism/Asperger’s folks just might be right.
   But, again, it’s just another mythology. After all those fights between my grandma and my uncle Mike – the endless roundabout discussions – should we be proud to have a famous artist in our family, or horrified to be related to the creator of an X-Rated Frankenstein, and those ridiculous Brillo Boxes? (That’s Not Art! I could do that in my own kitchen! insisted Aunt Ada, at least once), after all that and the countless other ways of seeing the man who’s art almost seemed a sideline by the end of his life, all we’re left with in any lasting way is his art.
   Gazing at the series of delicate gold-leaf covered ink drawings of young men he created in the late 50s, and the countless varieties of Coca Cola bottles, and dollar bills and even the starkly grave silkscreens of “Ambulance Disaster,” “12 Electric Chairs,” and “Orange Car Crash 14 Times,” I can only soak it in – not pretend to know what it means, or who he was.
   And as a Slovak, a Carpatho-Ruthenian (why not?), an American, and as the mother and daughter of beautiful, shy, creative males with autistic traits, I can also answer my elders: I, for one, am proud to be Andy Warhol’s cousin.
   The Andy Warhol Retrospective continues at MOCA, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, through August 18.