Andy Warhol Retrospective

Written by:
Arthur Lazere
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Los Angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art

May 25 – August 18, 2002

Ambulance Disaster (1963)

Andy Warhol: One Hundred Cans, 1962Buy it at Art.com

Andy Warhol (1987) DVD

Interviews with Andy Warhol, his family, and members of the Factory crew are blended with a look at his most famous works

The current Andy Warhol retrospective originated at the New National Gallery in Berlin and then was shown at London’s Tate Modern before traveling to its final and only American venue, Los Angeles MOCA where it is on view through August 18. It seems only a little strange that a major retrospective of an American artist originates with a German curator. Warhol, like Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen, seems to command greater depth of appreciation for his art abroad than at home. Perhaps American scholars don’t have sufficient distance from the images that Warhol drew from popular culture to be able to evaluate his art dispassionately. Based on attendance at this exhibit and on the successful Warhol industry that has been carefully nurtured by his heirs, the general public is greatly interested.

The show includes a substantial selection of early drawings by Warhol which show some of the influences on his work (commercial art, Matisse, Cocteau, Klee) and also prefigure his mature work both in technique and in content. Curator Heiner Bastian points out that Warhol sought escape from the unhappiness of his early life by emotional withdrawal, reflected in work that has "the artificiality of surface or the real proximity of emotionlessness, which were to permeate his life and work…" As he evolved his methodology to techniques of printing, such as the reproducible silk screen, this, too, reflected an emotional distance in the work. It’s work that is detached, with no attempt to create a pictorial space or light.

Warhol’s break into widespread recognition came with his depictions of Campbell’s soup cans, exhibited in a Los Angeles gallery in 1962. These full-blown Pop images, drawn from the mass marketing culture, make an ironic statement by virtue of their larger than life isolation in being presented as works of art; the array of many of these individual can paintings was a canny decision of the gallery owner, Irving Blum, emphasizing their commentary on a consumer society.

Warhol had actually used the array idea in a 1957 tempera Matches; subsequent to the success of the Campbell’s soup cans he integrated the array idea into many of his works, using as the base image such items as S&H Green Stamps and Coca Cola bottles. These brand name works played on the viewer’s intimate knowledge of the banal images, drawn from repeated advertising exposure. Whether their impact will hold for future generations for whom these images will be less familiar curiosities from the past, only time will tell. In their own historic context, they did significantly change the way the images were seen; it was an interaction between art and popular culture, a "strategy of appropriation.".

Warhol repeatedly focused on a handful of themes during his career: consumer imagery, fame, misfortune, injustice. Portraits of Liza Minelli, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy and others are often based on photographic underpinnings with an overlay of color that variously exaggerates the hair, the lips,the eyes. These images, too, were often presented in arrays. The wide public familiarity with these personalities from the media again provides the context in which Warhol makes his counter-imagery, ironically commenting on the nature of fame. A parallel effect is achieved in his appropriation of hugely popular art works of the masters — Mona Lisa, The Last Supper.

The misfortune and injustice themes have more emotive power: suicide, race riots, the electric chair, a burning car, most-wanted men, and, one of the most effective, Foot and Tire, in which the foot of a (presumably) runover victim bizarrely sticks out from under an enormous tire.And yet, for all their theatricality, these images are presented coolly, unemotionally.

From time to time, Warhol took his images to the edges of abstraction; a mural-sized work called Camouflage uses that well-known pattern and, in blowing it up with its repeated pattern, he not only revisits the array composition, but achieves an almost Pollockian energy (but not the Pollockian passion). It appears, however, not to be a direction that he pursued.

The range of inventiveness and the slick production of Warhol’s work cannot be denied. But the depth of its message seems limited and the breadth of theme narrow. Seen en masse in a large exhibit such as this one, Warhol’s utterly dispassionate presentation feels more like a barrier than an entry. This is cerebral work, work for the mind, not for the heart. While its impact during Warhol’s career was a powerful influence, there seems to have been little growth or development in the work once the formula was established. Its calculated and icy aloofness is not offset by profound insight.

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