One day in 1985, Andy Warhol’s cousin Christina Soley traveled from her home outside Pittsburgh to pay a visit to the artist’s studio in Midtown Manhattan. Interviewed in 2014 (she has since died), Soley recalled having found Warhol in a bad mood: He was crating up one of his many silk-screened portraits of Dolly Parton, complaining that the singer hadn’t liked it.
That’s not quite the story Warhol told in his diary. He said it was Parton’s agent, Sandy Gallin, who didn’t like the portraits, after having agreed to pay for them. But if Soley’s account is correct — as edited and then published, Warhol’s diary only ever tells part of any story — I think it confirms something that’s been stressed in the flood of appreciations of Parton since her death. Despite her lack of a fancy education, and the flighty country-girl persona she adopted in public, she was smart.
Parton’s astuteness may have extended to art, if it’s true she was disappointed by her Warhol portrait.
Warhol’s images of Parton don’t strike me as up to the level of his best society portraits — because, in a sense, they are too good. They give the singer a halo of spun-gold curls, flawless cream skin and lips and eyes so impossibly perfect, it’s as though the canvas itself had a session with a skilled makeup artist. The portraits flatter Parton, making her look gorgeous and vivacious and alive, like the wildly popular performer she was. And that means they go against one of Warhol’s most famous and important aphorisms: “When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something” — with the corollary that when you do something exactly right, you’re likely to come up empty.
The Parton painting is perfectly “right.” It stands, in its sheer attractiveness, as the latest in a long line of splashy portraits that, for centuries, have presented the official, public side of royals and aristocrats and captains of industry. Which means that it doesn’t show Warhol at his best, and is not quite worthy of Parton’s complex excellence, which managed to marry glitz and depth.
The works that have made Warhol matter, as an artist, were all weird and tough as could be: Paintings of soup cans, offered up as important works of fine art; unflinching images of racist cops, car crashes and suicides; almost-static films whose glory consists in being unwatchable; canvases “painted” in the artist’s urine. The very best of his society portraits are equally “wrongheaded” (and therefore, by his lights, right): Rather than capturing the individuality and deep character of their sitters, as the cliché about “great” portraits would have it, they are all about shallow surfaces and absent souls. Their sitters come across as empty commodities — soup cans — produced by the modern world’s worship of celebrity and power. Warhol said that he conceived of his many people-paintings, in aggregate, as a single work, a “portrait of society.” (That’s why he made them all the same size; he hoped someday to see them hung together.) And that portrait wasn’t meant to flatter the society it depicted.
Back when Warhol had first begun turning out his portraits, the critic Barbara Rose described them as capturing “the vacuous patron class that is supposed to support fine art in this country.” She called Warhol “not only our greatest realist, but our greatest moralist as well,” comparing him to Francisco Goya, portraitist to the Bourbons in Spain. “Warhol stands in a line with the bitterest challengers of society’s hypocrisies and conventions,” Rose said — but she should have added that Warhol, like Goya, often mounted his challenge so subtly that society could not always spot it.
My sense of Parton puts her in a similar camp: Crafting pleasing, even lively songs that slipped into the mainstream while mounting a critique of it. Her “9 to 5” works as a happy, boppy Hollywood theme song … that’s actually about the oppression of female office workers.
Warhol’s image portrays Parton as wonderfully lively and eager to please, but I don’t think it measures up to its sitter’s best songs. It doesn’t match the darkness that lurks beneath.
