TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/87/87mil.hol

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A Caterer of Repetition and Glut

March 9, 1987

Andy Warhol:  1928-1987

The tabloids gave Andy Warhol a Viking funeral last week, as well
they might.  At 58 he suffered cardiac arrest following gall-bladder
surgery.  To the end, he remained surrounded by an aura of popular
fame such as no other American artist had every known in his or her
lifetime--a flash-card recognizability that almost rivaled Picasso's.
Millions of Americans who could not have picked Jasper Johns or Henri
Matisse from a police lineup could identify that pale, squarish,
loose-lipped face with its acne, blinking gaze and silvery wig.

He was, after all, that weird guy who did those soup cans a quarter
of a century (was it really that long?) ago.  The working-class hero,
son of an immigrant Czech coal miner named Warhola in Pittsburgh, who
for a time acquired a court that seemed almost Habsburgian in scope
if not in distinction:  the Velazquez dwarfs of the Factory.  The guy
in the photo with Madonna, Liza, Jackie O.  The aesthete who said
money was the most important think in his life and in the future
everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, thus offering a tacky sort
of transcendence to every hair stylist, fledgling actor and art
student in America.  The ageless child of media fame who made scores
of underground films in which often nothing happened (Empire offered
eight hours of staring at the Empire State Building) and who
published his own magazine, Interview.  Andy, the living
transparency, with his face pressed to the shop window of the
AMerican dream and his head full of schemes to titillate an aging,
youth-obsessed American culture.

Warhol's early works were the ones that mattered.  He began as a
commercial artist, became for a time (between about 1962 and 1968) a
fine artist with something akin to genius and then lapsed back into a
barely disguised form of commercial art.  His sense of timing, his
grip on how to give an image graphic clout, and his fixation on style
as an end in itself all came out of his years of advertising and
display work during the '50s for I. Miller, Lord & Taylor, Glamour
and Vogue.  By the end of this period he was rich, professionally
famous and yearning for recognition as a serious artist.

The opportunity came with the Pop movement in the early '60s.  His
contribution was the image taken from advertising or tabloid
journalism:  grainy, immediate, a slice of unexplained life half-
registered over and over, full of slippages and visual stutters.
Marilyn Monroe repeated 50 times, 200 Campbell's soup cans, a canvas
filled edge to edge with effigies of Liz, Jackie, dollar bills or
Elvis.  Absurd though these pictures looked at first, Warhol's
fixation on repetition and glut emerged as the most powerful
statement ever made by an American artist on the subject of a
consumer economy.  The cranking out of designed objects of desire was
so faithfully mirrored in Warhol's images and so approvingly mimicked
in his sense of culture that no one, in fact, could be sure what he
thought.

He was also, from the outset, much possessed by death.  Warhol's
multiple-image disasters of the early '60s based on news photos of
fatal car wrecks are suffused with dread and compassion beneath their
icily casual surface.  Such works looked amazingly raw, frank and
direct when they were made.  More than 20 years later, they still do.

Then in 1968, one of Warhol's hangerson--a crazed actress named
Valeria Solanis--shot and wounded him with a .32.  Neither his
health nor his talent would fully recover.  There had been one Warhol
before the shooting; another would emerge after it.  The former had
been the onlooker, both fascinated and wounded by media culture and
its power to dictate desire and nostalgia.  You could not look at
early Warhol (Marilyn-as-virgin, in full drag-queeny apotheosis on a
gold ground; Golgotha, envisioned in repeated views of an execution
chamber with its electric chair and its sign enjoining SILENCE)
without sensing that the pressures behind such images of abased
sanctity came from a Byzantine Catholic boyhood.

But this intensity began to leak out of his work after the shooting,
and by the end of the '70s it was gone.  His energy last flickered in
the hieratic images of Mao Tsetung (1973) and perhaps in the 1976
paintings of hammers and sickles.  The rest was mostly social
portraiture, liquor endorsements and bathetic collaborations with
junior burnouts like Jean-Michel Basquiat, along with one single-
theme edition of prints after another.  But even in decline, Warhol
remained indicative.

In a sense, Warhol was to the art world what his buddy of the discos,
Roy Cohn, was to law.  Just as Cohn degraded the image of the legal
profession while leaving no doubt about his own forensic brilliance,
so Warhol released toxins of careerism, facetiousness and celebrity
worship into the stream of American culture.  He was the last artist
whose cynicism could still perplex the art world, which may explain
why--even after he said that art was just another job--people
continued to scan his latest efforts for signs of "subversive"
credentials.  In fact, his work was no more subversive than a
catering service, and as such it fit the age of Reagan nicely.  But
the Warhol who will survive, the artist of authentic inspiration,
died when he was shot 19 years ago, not last week.  And that artist,
in his tragic concision and awful openness, will haunt us for some
time yet.

--By Robert Hughes