“Marilyn Diptych,” by Andy Warhol, 1962.
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Warhol at the Whitney: Andy reconsidered
BY JUDITH A. SOKOLOFF
Can I see an Andy Warhol retrospective
with fresh eyes? Can I
separate myself from the bombardment
of his images and words
over his many decades of fame? Can I
forget Warhol’s often maligned “Business
of Art” credo: “Making money is
art and working is art and good business
is the best art.”
Am I able to ignore his ubiquitousness
that caused many of us to tire of
him?
Can I forget observers’ endless
sometimes contradictory comments:
He had no sexuality — though everything
he created was sexual; he slid
between insider and outsider personas;
he was or wasn’t political; he literally
died and was revived; he lived
with his mother forever.
Can I ignore that he once said, “If
you’re not trying to be real you don’t
have to get it right,” and “Art is what
you can get away with.”
Calling himself “deeply superfi cial,”
he was a man both hidden and revealed,
an artist-designer who curated
himself. Can I fi nd the man in this exhibition?
I can forget, and I can sort of fi nd
him. Walking among the 350 works
in “Andy Warhol — From A to B and
Back Again,” at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, I simply enjoy
his exuberant, in-your-face yet often
mysterious works of art, his original
observations of people and things, his
unbounded foray into different media.
I fall for Warhol’s seductive intensity,
passionate colors, the sheer power
of his images, his perpetual inventiveness.
Warhol’s energy bounces off the
walls. He wants us to engage, and that
is what I do.
Organized by Donna De Salvo,
the Meatpacking District museum’s
deputy director for international initiatives
and senior curator, assisted by
Christie Mitchell and Mark Loiacono,
the show is designed to make Warhol
alive and relevant for both the old and
the young.
First there are Warhol’s Pop Art
classics: Stacked Brillo boxes and
paintings of Campbell’s soup cans,
Coca-Cola bottles and other images
from popular and mass culture. I’m
sorry, Andy, that you never got to shop
at BJ’s or use Amazon to endlessly deliver
things to your door. You would
have somehow turned the process inside
out.
My eye catches fl ashes of hot pink —
I follow it around a corner. Covering
the walls of a huge gallery, Warhol’s
1960’s silk-screened pink cow wallpaper
(on yellow background) and multicolored
hibiscus fl owers assault and
embrace me simultaneously. Visitors
can’t help but pose for photos against
this stunning background. Children
point, spin, jump up and down.
Next, Warhol’s foundational work
as a commercial illustrator in the
’50s reveals the beginnings of his innovative
and experimental nature.
Freelance work for magazines led to
a job designing newspaper ads for I.
Miller and Sons shoes. Then in the
early ’60s, he reinvented himself as a
gallery artist. Rejecting the Abstract
Expressionist work that was dominant
among New York painters, he began
using silk-screening, a commercial reproductive
technology.
There is Warhol the fi lmmaker.
In a dark room, you can view several
short fi lms and videos from the period
from 1963 to 1968 when he produced
hundreds of fi lms in a wide range of
genres and styles. There’s Warhol,
man of letters: On display are books,
magazines and texts he published
throughout his career. The “Death
and Disaster” section reveals a fearful
side: police attacking civil-rights
workers, car crashes, suicide, the electric
chair in Ossining Prison shortly
before the execution of the Rosenbergs,
an unfl attering portrait of
Nixon. Warhol’s single largest body of
work were his commissioned portraits
(photographed with his Polaroid, then
silk-screened), produced from 1968
to 1987. He was attracted to the rich
and famous, and they to him. An entire
room on the fi rst fl oor is devoted
to these portraits, which were a steady
means of funding for his other projects.
Warhol also photographed everyday
scenes, friends, colleagues, queer
culture, drag queens — constantly.
“A picture means I know where I
was every minute,” he said. “That’s
why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.”
He probably would have loved curating
his life for Instagram.
A darker side of Warhol emerges
in his large images of a gun, a skull,
a green devilish self-portrait against
a black background. The giant 1978
“Oxidation Painting” is the result
of people urinating on gold metallic
paint.
The show’s fi nale consists of four
massive paintings. In “Camoufl age
Last Supper” (1986, 7 feet by 25 feet),
Jesus and his apostles are both hidden
and revealed, like Warhol himself.
Facing this Last Supper is a canvas
covered with 63 barely perceptible
images of the Mona Lisa, painted in
hues of white. Two Rorschach paintings
face each other on the other opposing
walls.
This section is quieter, almost meditative.
But don’t look too long, Warhol
would have warned, or the work loses
all of its meaning. And that meaning
is yours to fi gure out.
“I’m the type who’d be happy not
going anywhere, as long as I was sure
I knew exactly what was happening
at the places I wasn’t going to,” Warhol
said. “I’m the type who’d like to
sit home and watch every party that
I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.”
He also said he felt compelled to go
out.
Well, Andy, I hope you’re somewhere
watching the people gazing at
your retrospective. With your compulsion
to record and make everyday life
into the subject of art, you’d appreciate
the thousands of selfi es and other
photos being shot here.
I hope you’ve put aside comments
about your work being vacuous and
critics not liking it. I hope you’re smiling
at the many millions of dollars
your art has continued to fetch.
And I hope you heard these comments:
A woman to her friend in the
Whitney gift shop, “I’m not impressed
by what is supposed to be a genius.”
And one man to another near the giant
Mao painting, “Warhol really was
a genius!”
“Andy Warhol — From A to B and
Back Again,” Whitney Museum of
American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., on
view through March 31. For more information,
visit whitney.org .
Schneps Community News Group TVG November 15, 2018 19