On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art THE ARTIST AS SUPERSTAR BY JAMES R. MELLOW A GRISLY news photo of a car crash: The image, enlarged and repeated for emphasis, has been silk-screened onto canvas in a blunt, un-artistic...
...and finally the late sequence of flower pictures...
...He has an art director's knack for seizing on fashionable trends and promoting them well before the herd does them to death...
...It consists almost entirely in the differences: the differences of scale, the perfunctoriness of technique, the gaudiness of color, the banality of repetition...
...the public faces, perfect illustrations for a history of taste in the '60s if not examples of the decade's major art...
...the portraits of movie stars and "wanted men...
...He tried painting comic strip pictures drawn from Dick Tracy and Popeye...
...his long, bare torsr>—draped in that improbable position—looks pathetic, vulnerable, almost indecent...
...the disaster series, ranging from scenes of car crashes to race riots...
...Not only was his subject matter easily recognizable, in contrast to the dripped and splattered abstract scrawls of the reigning Abstract Expressionists, but it gave a new status to the commonly despised contributions of commercial art...
...The picture testifies to the obscenity of death and violence in contemporary society...
...The portrait bears witness to the vulgarity of glamor...
...In this series of largish, stenciled pictures—with their combinations of purples, blues, soured greens, oranges—the solitary image and the masterful use of color work very effectively...
...One of the finest demonstrations of this can be found in his multiple self-portraits, where the mood can change abruptly from chic glamor to the early psychedelic...
...By the late '60s, many critics felt he was no longer a serious contender as a painter, having largely deserted the field for filmmaking...
...But it's so easy to make movies...
...When success in that field paled, he began yearning for the serious consideration that artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom also did commercial work, were achieving in the New York art world...
...He catapulted his Campbell's soup cans, his duplicated Brillo boxes, and his portraits of movie idols—Marilyn and Elvis and Liz and Marlon—into the realm of serious art...
...his silk-screen paintings tend to be artfully sloppy and casual...
...The idea of painting Campbell's soup cans was given to him, gratis, by a friend who had earlier charged him S50 for suggesting that he paint dollar bills, which he also did...
...Even some of the soup cans at the Whitney exhibition sustain themselves as among the best of Warhol's works...
...Like a Hollywood film star in the comic tradition, he has tried to create an aura of mystery about his beginnings...
...IN 1968, it will be recalled, Warhol was shot twice in the stomach by one of his perfervid movie starlets at the "Factory," the Manhattan loft that served as headquarters for his art-and-film industry...
...On Art THE ARTIST AS SUPERSTAR BY JAMES R. MELLOW A GRISLY news photo of a car crash: The image, enlarged and repeated for emphasis, has been silk-screened onto canvas in a blunt, un-artistic manner...
...From the outset Warhol has been a kind of Yellow Book figure, with an air of the perverse and the decadent clinging to his reputation and his performances...
...He did continue to grind out reruns of his electric-chair, soup-can and flower pictures, though, and he produced a series of helium-filled silver pillows for his 1966 Castelli show...
...His output was seriously curtailed during a prolonged recovery, and he is reportedly still suffering from one wound that has not healed...
...It should be granted, too, that he possesses a perverse talent for cranking out images suitable for a wishful-thinking, violence-prone, commodity-conscious society, without ever feeling obliged to moralize or explain...
...In fact, Tomkins suggests that the shaggy blond artist with the sickly pallor and Slavic eyes may have completed the process of becoming a public legend, his own best "superstar...
...I never give my background, and anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked...
...His shirt has been pulled down over his head...
...As he rather luridly puts it: "Andy, in what one fervently hopes is just another put-on, begins to look more and more like the angel of death...
...I must confess to having developed a certain fondness for some of Warhol's familiar art productions: the flower pictures, monotonous and garish though they may be...
...the eyeliner, a jazzy turquoise...
...The force of impact has flung the car door open and jammed the front seat forward...
...He quotes Warhol as saying: "We're going to start making serious movies...
...Ambitious, despite his carefully cultivated pose of diffidence, he soon put his skills as a draughtsman to work...
...Indeed, if Warhol can be said to have contributed anything to the formal issues of modern painting— aside from his cult of images and mechanical techniques like silk-screening—it is, I think, an obsessive tendency to investigate the power of color, or combinations of color, for establishing mood...
...In that role—and it is a testimony to his success—Warhol has managed to have his humble pie served up a la mode...
...His succeeding New York shows—at the Stable Gallery, then at Leo Castelli's—did even better...
...His 1963 exhibition of wooden boxes, silk-screened to look like cartons of Brillo and Mott's Apple Juice, had crowds of people waiting in line to gain admission to the opening...
...And he has an artist's disdain for the typically fastidious formats of commercial art...
...Then, in closed-circuit adulation, these film stars were fed back to the magazines and to the television and movie screens from which they had originated...
...The colors are garish: the hair, a brassy yellow...
...At the artist's request, the show has been limited to five series: the Campbell's soup can paintings and the Brillo boxes, both famous emblems in Pop Art's iconography...
...But film critic Jonas Mekas, in an essay surveying the 70-odd movies Warhol has produced since 1963, anticipates more to come from the artist's "obsession unto death" with film...
...Against this backdrop, he has bunched large masses of equally garish pictures, producing an effect of dizzying and preposterous bad taste...
...With Warhol, the difference is everything...
...Tomkins implies that Warhol may be ready now to remove himself from the art scene in the fashion of Marcel Duchamp, who is one of Warhol's favorite cultural heroes...
...The face —coarsened, darkened, occasionally bleached out—has been repeated effortlessly, a rubber-stamped likeness filling its allotted space on the canvas...
...The artist, who has maintained an attitude of indifference toward success, reportedly wanted to enable visitors to get one quick, startling look at his "retrospective" and then depart without proceeding any further...
...As is evident in the large collection of his work now on view at the Whitney Museum, however, Warhol's art does not derive from the trite or gruesome imagery he employs...
...Warhol became the most famous of ine Pop Art stars—Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Dine, among them—who created the new vernacular art of the decade...
...Instead, he presents him as a comic, diffident figure at the mercy of the cultural establishment...
...The Campbell's soup paintings created a stir when they were displayed at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962...
...Some of his experiments, like Eat— a 45-minute sequence of Pop artist Robert Indiana consuming a mushroom—seemed to push the limits of the artistic sublime to ridiculous weariness...
...As an exercise in the blatantly overdone, the show's opening section is stunning...
...Warhol's next move was into underground movies and he soon became equally famous for his deadpan camera technique, producing a series of mundane and erotic films...
...Andy Warhol has become an expert at image-mongering...
...you can just shoot and every picture comes out right," says Warhol...
...the overpainted lips, a floozy red...
...Calvin Tom-kins" biographical sketch of the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Andy Warhol (New York Graphic Society, 160 pp., $5.00), quotes him as saying: "I'd prefer to remain a mystery...
...What is there is, quite simply, what is there—with perhaps an occasional hint of the sinister or the fatuous for added dramatic effect...
...Although the Whitney exhibition includes 240 works that have previously toured London, Paris and Einhoven, Holland, it does not provide a complete retrospective of Warhol's phenomenal career...
...The driver, thrust out onto the pavement, lies bloodied and dead, face-up amid the wreckage...
...but Lichtenstein was doing that more successfully...
...The ascertainable facts are mundane enough: Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in the early '30s and in 1949 moved to New York where he became the shy, protected baby of an uptown Bohemian commune...
...He tried Coca-Cola bottles, but James Rosenquist was already rendering such commodity subjects as Seven-Up, both bigger and better...
...The largest room of the museum's fourth-floor galleries has been entirely decorated with Warhol's cow wallpaper—a design of lavender cowheads on a yellow-green field...
...The passenger, hurled through the roof, hangs lifelessly over the side of the car...
...Another image, this one of Marilyn Monroe, is not brutal in itself, but it has been brutalized...
...A highly successful commercial artist and designer—he did shoe ads for I. Miller, windows for Bonwit Teller—Warhol earned, according to Tomkins, "close to fifty thousand a year" at the height of his Madison Avenue career...
...The fact that Warhol took his images bodily from the media made his work doubly attractive to the publicity mills in the early '60s...
...Initially, he seems to have been at a loss for ideas...
...Perhaps one ought also to acknowledge that Warhol's public performance has added a little variety to the conventional myth of the artist as a romantic egoist, the outcast of society...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
