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Lot Essay
Looming from the shadows, materialising within the black canvas, Dracula appears, baring his fangs. He has been captured on the canvas through a darker-than-dark area depicting his cloak and hair and through lines that are sparse flashes of incandescent colour, adding to the sense of the immaterial, the unreal, the apparition. For this is not a celebrity per se, but instead a monster, a spectral figure. And, crucially, a fictitious one.
This use of a fictitious character marked a departure for Andy Warhol. Dracula was one of ten themes that Warhol tackled in a group of works entitled the Myths or New Myths. Ever the iconoclast, ever willing to plunder the wealth of images generated in our media-saturated world, during the late 1970s and early 1980s Warhol began to choose subjects for his images in a more reflective and self-reflexive way. This resulted in works such as the Reversals, where he created a strange and sombre negative of images that had become instantly recognisable as the work of the master. Meanwhile, in the Myths he tackled the theme of celebrity that had for so long been his source and his obsession in an exciting new way. Instead of taking stars, he took icons of a different sort, a fictitious pantheon. These were the personalities of popular culture, of fiction and the mass media, of television, comics, mythology, film. So, alongside Dracula, Warhol created images of Superman, Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, Mammy, Howdy Doody, The Witch, Greta Garbo as The Star and a self-portrait as The Shadow. The process of selection for these ten characters was hugely rigorous. Warhol in fact took many photographs and scanned many source materials, discarding other ideas such as Mother Goose and the Tooth Fairy.
The 'celebrities' to whom Warhol was now turning were figments of the public perception, strange ciphers of the modern consciousness. These had their origins in different sources. Garbo was here used as the archetype for the generic Hollywood star, an untouchable staple of modern life and the modern media. A comic-strip image of Superman, that all-American superhero, was used, while Warhol also managed to get his hands on a Howdy Doody puppet, adding a sense of portraiture to his depiction of the television character who had coloured and shaped so many childhood memories for people of Warhol's generation and later. And for the witch, he managed to convince Margaret Hamilton, who had played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, to reprise her role four decades later, as he knew her from his neighbourhood.
For several of the images, including The Witch, Warhol recruited people in his acquaintance to take the roles, while he himself was The Shadow, one of the prototype American superheroes. This strange bleeding between the world of the artist himself and the world of his modern mythical figures indicates to some degree an autobiographical element to these pictures, which to some degree mine Warhol's own nostalgia while also reflecting various aspects of his own character. This is especially apparent in Dracula. Instead of using an old classic film still, as he had in his 1963 work The Kiss (Bela Lugosi), he managed to arrange for a friend of his, male model Sean McKeon, to dress up as the vampire count. On the one hand, he benefited from using a clearly good-looking man in the role of the suave vampire, and on the other hand managed also to introduce some contextual irony. The idea of taking a male model and presenting him as a vampire is itself a reflection of attitudes towards the bold and the beautiful, all the more acid in tone in its homosexual subtext, which is barely 'sub' at all.
This aspect of the theme and of the fancy-dress posturing is all the more intriguing in Dracula because of the strange nature of Warhol's relation with McKeon. Although post-dating this picture, entries in his 'diaries' refer to McKeon's own interest vampiric in a good way in Warhol: 'Sean McKeon called and he's back from a modelling job in Hamburg,' Warhol recorded in 1982. 'He said he's breaking up with the girl he's living with she has a nice apartment and that he was up for grabs if I want him, so I said I'd think about it and call him' (Warhol, 26 April 1982, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, New York, 1989, p. 440). And later he muses in true Warholian style, 'Sean's had a crush on me for a few years and it's nice to be around someone who likes you' (Warhol, 21 October 1983, ibid., p. 536).
The fact that Warhol chose his friend and admirer McKeon to play Dracula in his picture is all the more intriguing because of the autobiographical nature of the theme. For Warhol himself had been dubbed 'Drella' by Ondine, a nickname that stuck (and was used in the title of Lou Reed and John Cale's posthumous tribute to the Pop svangali, Songs for Drella). This was a conflation of Dracula and Cinderella, reflecting two aspects of Warhol's personality, of the vampire and the princess. These were two marginal characters infiltrating society in their different ways, just as Warhol was, and it is this aspect that is at the heart of Dracula. The stock-horror theme has become a part of a modern canon of new saints and archetypes, and has been smuggled into the hallowed art galleries, into the realm of so-called 'high art'.
This use of a fictitious character marked a departure for Andy Warhol. Dracula was one of ten themes that Warhol tackled in a group of works entitled the Myths or New Myths. Ever the iconoclast, ever willing to plunder the wealth of images generated in our media-saturated world, during the late 1970s and early 1980s Warhol began to choose subjects for his images in a more reflective and self-reflexive way. This resulted in works such as the Reversals, where he created a strange and sombre negative of images that had become instantly recognisable as the work of the master. Meanwhile, in the Myths he tackled the theme of celebrity that had for so long been his source and his obsession in an exciting new way. Instead of taking stars, he took icons of a different sort, a fictitious pantheon. These were the personalities of popular culture, of fiction and the mass media, of television, comics, mythology, film. So, alongside Dracula, Warhol created images of Superman, Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, Mammy, Howdy Doody, The Witch, Greta Garbo as The Star and a self-portrait as The Shadow. The process of selection for these ten characters was hugely rigorous. Warhol in fact took many photographs and scanned many source materials, discarding other ideas such as Mother Goose and the Tooth Fairy.
The 'celebrities' to whom Warhol was now turning were figments of the public perception, strange ciphers of the modern consciousness. These had their origins in different sources. Garbo was here used as the archetype for the generic Hollywood star, an untouchable staple of modern life and the modern media. A comic-strip image of Superman, that all-American superhero, was used, while Warhol also managed to get his hands on a Howdy Doody puppet, adding a sense of portraiture to his depiction of the television character who had coloured and shaped so many childhood memories for people of Warhol's generation and later. And for the witch, he managed to convince Margaret Hamilton, who had played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, to reprise her role four decades later, as he knew her from his neighbourhood.
For several of the images, including The Witch, Warhol recruited people in his acquaintance to take the roles, while he himself was The Shadow, one of the prototype American superheroes. This strange bleeding between the world of the artist himself and the world of his modern mythical figures indicates to some degree an autobiographical element to these pictures, which to some degree mine Warhol's own nostalgia while also reflecting various aspects of his own character. This is especially apparent in Dracula. Instead of using an old classic film still, as he had in his 1963 work The Kiss (Bela Lugosi), he managed to arrange for a friend of his, male model Sean McKeon, to dress up as the vampire count. On the one hand, he benefited from using a clearly good-looking man in the role of the suave vampire, and on the other hand managed also to introduce some contextual irony. The idea of taking a male model and presenting him as a vampire is itself a reflection of attitudes towards the bold and the beautiful, all the more acid in tone in its homosexual subtext, which is barely 'sub' at all.
This aspect of the theme and of the fancy-dress posturing is all the more intriguing in Dracula because of the strange nature of Warhol's relation with McKeon. Although post-dating this picture, entries in his 'diaries' refer to McKeon's own interest vampiric in a good way in Warhol: 'Sean McKeon called and he's back from a modelling job in Hamburg,' Warhol recorded in 1982. 'He said he's breaking up with the girl he's living with she has a nice apartment and that he was up for grabs if I want him, so I said I'd think about it and call him' (Warhol, 26 April 1982, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, New York, 1989, p. 440). And later he muses in true Warholian style, 'Sean's had a crush on me for a few years and it's nice to be around someone who likes you' (Warhol, 21 October 1983, ibid., p. 536).
The fact that Warhol chose his friend and admirer McKeon to play Dracula in his picture is all the more intriguing because of the autobiographical nature of the theme. For Warhol himself had been dubbed 'Drella' by Ondine, a nickname that stuck (and was used in the title of Lou Reed and John Cale's posthumous tribute to the Pop svangali, Songs for Drella). This was a conflation of Dracula and Cinderella, reflecting two aspects of Warhol's personality, of the vampire and the princess. These were two marginal characters infiltrating society in their different ways, just as Warhol was, and it is this aspect that is at the heart of Dracula. The stock-horror theme has become a part of a modern canon of new saints and archetypes, and has been smuggled into the hallowed art galleries, into the realm of so-called 'high art'.