TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/021389/02138900.022

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 7KB | 125 lines

ART, Page 94

The Best And Worst Of Warhol

A show traces the banality that inspired and undid him
By Robert Hughes


    New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which showed no great
enthusiasm for Andy Warhol while he was alive, went after him con
brio as soon as he was dead. The bakemeats were barely cold upon
the funeral table when the word went out that MOMA was going to
give Warhol the palladium of a full-scale retrospective -- his
first in New York since the more premature effort that went on view
at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Whether MOMA wanted
to get the crowds before a rival museum did, or simply to get the
job over and out of the way, is uncertain: probably both.

    Of the 273 works in the show, more @than a third are from
Warhol's estate, mostly very early or very late ones, though no
special interest attaches to "Warhol's Warhols" beyond the
circumstance that they were unsold at the time of his death.
Nevertheless, despite this compliance with their sales pitch, the
guardians of Warhol's name and estate (who are busy marketing his
aura like a combination of Jesus Christ's and Donald Duck's) are
reportedly miffed by the form that the show took at the hands of
its curator, Kynaston McShine. The show's emphasis falls on Warhol
up to 1968, the year he was shot by a mad lumpen-feminist named
Valerie Solanis, one of the hangers-on at his studio, the Factory.
The treatment of post-1970 and especially of 1980s Warhol is, by
comparison, skimpy.

    Is this fair to Warhol? No, if you are among those who think
he was the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock,
a genius whose spirit continues to brood over American culture and
to infuse the best young art of our time. Yes, if you think that
Warhol had about five remarkable years (1962-67) followed by a long
downhill slide into money-raking banality, with his social
portraits and his silk-screen editions of dogs, famous Jews of the
20th century and Mercedes; or that his actual influence on younger
artists varied from liberating to moderately disastrous. The show
fills in details in one's knowledge of Warhol's work -- for
instance, how his fascination with the repeated image was there
from his earliest days as an illustrator -- but does not change
one's sense of its basic priorities.

    Much of the work, in fact, now seems an appendage to Warhol's
most authoritative creation: his fame -- the meticulous
construction of a persona vivid in its coy blandness, pervasive
and teasing in its appeal to the media, and deathlessly inorganic.
Warhol looked like the last dandy, right from the start of his
public career. As the late critic Harold Rosenberg put it, he was
"the figure of the artist as nobody, though a nobody with a
resounding signature." This subverted the romantic stereotype of
the artist -- hot, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence
-- that American popular culture, and hence most American
collectors, had boiled down from Van Gogh and Pollock.

    Instead, in Warhol one had the detached art-supplier with
mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz,
dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts,
somehow, that Warhol plow[ed through Faust before cranking out his
flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No
ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his
innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be
wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be
about Jackie or Marilyn.

    The sense of deja vu one gets from the show is hardly the
curator's fault. It is built into the career itself. Warhol's
paintings came out of a culture of mass production and
reproduction, and have been run back through it so widely and often
that they contain very few surprises. With a few piercing
exceptions, they seem generic. His Mona Lisas are by now as famous
as Leonardo's, especially for people who don't care much for old
art. (Except that, for a lot of the audience, they are old art --
mysterious icons of the remote '60s.) On the whole, the sense of
expansion and refreshment one feels in going from a reproduction
of a well-known painting to its original is lacking, because his
paintings are all based on silk-screen reproduction of photographic
images. Whether flat and grainy, as in the '60s, or worked up with
a creamy slather of broad-brush pigment, as in the '70s and '80s,
they are essentially simulations of the act of painting, types of
visual packaging.

    Warhol began and ended as a commercial illustrator; what lies
between is the interesting stuff. He was an adroit draftsman but
not a distinguished one. He soon overcame the influences of his
early advertising days (Jean Cocteau and Ben Shahn), but the
drawing is never more than efficient. Partly for this reason his
freehand "studies" of soup cans or dollar bills never acquire the
pressure of the silk-screened ones,d but it is hard to see how they
could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking
Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments on
the standardization of mass taste in American art. On desire,
Warhol could be dreadfully accurate. His idea of silk-screening
Marilyn Monroe's disembodied smile 168 times over derived, no
doubt, from Man Ray's painting of Kiki de Montparnasse's lips
floating in the Paris sky, but the feeling is quite different. It
is about the administration of fantasy by media, not the enjoyment
of fantasy by lovers.

    Warhol's power, uneven as it was, lay in an emotional narrative
that contradicted its cold, fixed, iconic surface. He unskeined a
story in which a horror of the world, verging sometimes on acute
dread, mingled with an artificial calm and a desire for
transcendence. Try as one may, one cannot imagine Gold Marilyn
Monroe, 1962, being painted by anyone but a Roman Catholic
homosexual; it is both completely camp in its pseudo-Byzantine
extravagance and, in its identification of the star with the
Madonna, yearningly devotional. Here, Warhol is Genet in paint. So
too with the "disasters" and the electric chairs of the early and
mid-'60s, which are truly awful in their curt, grainy enunciation
of the facts of casual or ceremonial death. The sign on the wall
of the death chamber -- SILENCE -- provides an essential motif of
Warhol's imagination, and it was hardly an accident of gesture that
his best-known self-portrait has his finger on his lips.

    But the intensity of these early images is closely linked to
the rapture with which Warhol first discovered his own ability to
use detachment -- to make art with what he had, out of his sense
that high art had actually dissolved into mass media. When this
ceased to surprise him, his work came too pat. It coarsened and
turned industrial. Even his later images of foreboding and death,
like the skulls, are trashily melodramatic by comparison with what
had gone before, while his inflated recyclings of Raphael's Sistine
Madonna and Leonardo's Last Supper could scarcely be more
pointless. In the end he was stranded in a plenitude of subjects
with nothing to paint.