He was — and is — a fascinating, frustrating bundle of contradictions: dandy, provocateur, lifelong Catholic; painfully shy and somehow life of the party; obsessed with money; a social climber; shallow but deep. A commercial artist, a fine artist, and finally, as he himself described, an “Art Businessman or Business Artist,” churning out films, portraits, books, videos and a magazine in massive quantities. “I want to be a machine,” he said.
Though there have been large Warhol retrospectives in Chicago, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989, there hasn’t been a gallery exhibition of Warhol’s work in twenty years — until now. I recently had the rare experience of seeing a wide range of his work in a small exhibition, Andy Warhol, at Russell Bowman Art Advisory in the River North district. It included work from all phases of Warhol’s career, from early illustrations to a large canvas, “Statue of Liberty,” painted in 1986 as part of the camouflage series the year before Warhol died. Bowman, the former director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, curated an exhibition of some of the most important pieces of the Warhol oeuvre and juxtaposed them with lesser-known hammer-and-sickle drawings from the ’70s and ’50s-era hand-colored lithographs of butterflies and shoes.
Something about standing in the presence of “Liz,” the “Brillo Boxes,” and a small 1966 self-portrait, only underlined the complexities at hand. There they were: iconic images I feel I’ve known all my life, but now somehow entirely new: I noticed the flat expanses of color on “Liz” and how they slightly and resolutely mismatched the black-and-white photographic image, the thickness of the paint and the faint unevenly stretched canvas on the self-portrait. Everything was smaller than I expected, but somehow more overpowering. And since many of the works in Bowman’s gallery were for sale, I also experienced another odd sensation: the very consumer lust Warhol is expert at depicting. As I gazed upon “Shoes” (1980), in which several pairs of high heels float in a glittery black void of diamond dust, I thought, “Someday, I must have one of these.” With a price tag of $240,000, I realized, tottering in my own heels, that I may need to pursue a career other than art criticism.
It could be argued that Warhol is the reason for the pervasive present-day concept that art can appropriate, celebrate, and critique consumer/celebrity-obsessed culture. It was not just accomplished with shoes or Pop-era Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes. As a commercial fashion illustrator in the ’50s, his early pen-and-ink drawings were simple, elegant graphic elements in an era that had already begun to prefer the “realism” of photography. His films, in conjunction with director Paul Morrissey, introduced unheard-of levels of abstraction to the medium. His flat, candy-colored, close-up photo-based portraits of the very rich redefined the “society portraitist” near the end of the 20th century.
“If you want to know what my art is about, just look at the surface,” Warhol once claimed. His enigmatic public persona — the monotone, noncommittal interviews, the prophetic pronouncements, the crazy, controversial characters he surrounded himself with in the sixties — provides the biographical art historian with much fodder for nonspecific interpretations (such as the fact that his work is, indeed, all about “surface” and has “no point”). It’s too easy, of course.
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But if I focus on what art historian Thomas Crow calls the “second Warhol” (the complicated, multifaceted artist with specific phases of work, as opposed to the “first Warhol” — the public one), we can begin to examine and reconcile what I find most frustrating about Warhol as an artist: the fact that I am affected deeply, and sometimes mysteriously, by his work in a way that is antithetical to “surface-only” readings; that even though many of the work in Russell Bowman’s exhibition were prints in editions of hundreds, I reacted to them in the same way I might to a one-of-a-kind old master painting. I continue to discover new details (whether in the overwhelming amount of Warhol-related scholarship, in the artist’s “own” words, or through concentrated meditation on the work itself) that elucidate a more complex Warhol.
Since I’m so genuinely moved by it, reading Warhol’s work by glorifying his “intent” seems counterintuitive, and I assume that the real “intent” is Warhol’s self-trivialization as conscious posturing intended to deflect criticism. Art critic Matthew Collings believes that they are instead “designed to deflate pomposity or a falsely elevated sense of self or individualism, or the larger than life individual that artists are supposed to be.” In his book This Is Modern Art, he describes how these comments were explicit attacks against Abstract Expressionist values.
It is equally as frustrating to approach his work from the opposite end of the spectrum: a detached formalist perspective (the preferred method, perhaps, among Ab Ex-era critics) since my contemporary experience of Warhol is so closely intertwined with my perceptions of him as a larger-than-life character. Even if I were to somehow disregard what Crow refers to as the “first Warhol” (the collection of self-imposed myth), a formal analysis is difficult when much of the content itself (like Elizabeth Taylor) is mythical and is presented in a way that perpetuates those myths.
When considering his place in the History of Art proper, I think of Collings’ description of the “three big myths of Modern art...Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol...these myths are all referred to unconsciously all the time by art historians.” And he goes a step further: “Picasso is Gauloise, Pollock is Marlboro, but Warhol is the pure concept of the brand name without even the necessity for cigarettes,” Collings says, using a convenient, yet appropriate, product-based metaphor. Perhaps it rings true because the most lasting Andy Warhol myth is not the one he created himself, but the that myth continues to evolve. Meanwhile, the breadth of Warhol’s influence is still being felt in the newest-of-new cultural products. Since most of his work is not abstract, and so many of his subjects are still very contemporaneous, their meanings are still loaded, still shifting as our perception of American culture does.