Tate Modern's Warhol exhibition was forced by COVID restrictions to close twice during its 2020 run. Originally planned and presented as the gallery's summer blockbuster exhibition, its curators had sought to reassess and recontextualise Andy Warhol’s contemporary significance. When the exhibition first opened in March, it lasted just five days before it was shut down. Following a restricted re-opening in the late (northern) summer, it was again forced to shut down prematurely before the end of its scheduled run in November.
To mitigate the impacts of COVID, Tate Modern had by early April, pivoted the exhibition to a pared-down, on-line experience. While not complete, the presentation offered remote audiences direct access to how the gallery's curators were presenting Warhol, three decades after his premature death in 1987.
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Soundtrack: "I'm Waiting for my Man", Velvet Underground featuring Lou Reed, 1967. Managed by Andy Warhol.
(Licensed: APRA). Images: Dreamtime, Creative Commons
Today, Warhol’s disembodied visage is as iconic as many of his more memorable images. But, can we truly appraise him as one of the artistic greats of the twentieth century? It takes time to determine who and what enters into the canon of the culture. But it does seem that the output of his extraordinary visual breakthroughs from 1962 to 1965 will secure him that place.
If money is a measure of significance—a proposition Warhol would thoroughly endorse—then he is right up there. Of the 50 highest priced artworks, five are by Warhol (Van Gogh and Picasso exceed him). He's been wandering for twenty years, in and out of Forbes' list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. Joining him in his Warholian heaven are several of his favourite subjects—Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis.
After 1945, as one of the spoils of victory, New York succeeded Paris as the world’s leading centre of contemporary art. America was then, at its absolute peak in terms of comparative wealth and power. Assured confidence abounded.
In the initial post-war period, the Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning) represented the leading edge of New York’s avant-garde. However, as day follows night, innovators invariably create the new status quo. By the late fifties, a nascent Pop Art movement (including Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Johns) was pushing past the Abstract Expressionists to claim their place as the new avant-garde.
At that time, Warhol was one of New York’s most successful commercial illustrators. He had been trying to make his mark in the serious art world and was positioning himself within the emerging Pop Art scene. Yet, similar to today, he was held back by the chasm many felt existed between commercial and fine art. When he did breakthrough in 1962, it was in Los Angeles with an exhibition of Campbell’s Soup cans. The provocative novelty of Warhol’s visual proposition showered him broad media exposure. Within a mediated-instant, Warhol was the public face and principal exemplifier of the new cutting edge.
Pop’s sensibilities represented a significant break from the preceding style of Abstract Expressionism. After half a century of increasing abstraction across the art world, Pop marked the definitive return to the representational. It was, says Edward Lucie-Smith, “a consciously demotic style”. That is, people could easily access and understand it. It borrowed its source imagery from the artefacts of everyday life, including films, advertisements and packaging,. “In Warhol's case... making use of things known from the more lurid varieties of tabloid journalism.”
Pop Art presented its vision as an impersonal statement. It directly challenged Abstract Expressionism’s commitment to a truth expressed through raw feelings and personal symbolism. Next to Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism looks like an indulgent primal exercise in masculinist emotional excess—definitely not Warhol’s thing.
Warhol extended Pop Art’s love of non-engagement to himself, by cultivating a studied sense of personal detachment. Lucie-Smith says that “Warhol became famous for his professional blankness; his lack of reaction to what was said to him... it was an attitude that extended to [his] art”.
Warhol was never interested in constructing a visual narrative. He was more concerned with the immediate impact of an arresting image. From his experiences in applying commercial graphics in the world of advertising, Warhol understood the practices and processes of commodification. He broke the slick process open; recalibrating it, before relaunching it back into an unvirtuous cycle of endless repetition.
Warhol used repetition—within the one image and across different versions—to inflate fame and inflame celebrity. Repetition striped his subjects of individuality and humanity, prepping them for greater sacrifice to the broader culture via the bubbling stew of the mass media. He activated the process through the comparatively low technology of silk-screen printing. It could mimic the well-established, industrially streamlined commercial process. However, as a manual process, silk-screen printing imparted its own variations, unplanned mistakes and degrees of image degradation. The outcome of his approach was a new, yet entirely derivative image; editioned, signed, primed and framed by Warhol, ready for re-consumption.
A half-observant viewer might conclude that Warhol was commenting on the vacuity of consumer culture. But Warhol would deny any deeper meaning beyond the apparent surface image. A thousand PhD students might disagree, yet it's difficult to see his work as a parody of consumerism. He loved, understood and practised its processes too well and loved its outcomes too much.
In his breakthrough period, death readily drew Warhol’s prurient interests; be it a tabloid rendition of a suburban plane crash or a ghoulish view of an impassive electric chair. He projected celebrity through the exacerbating lenses of tragedy and death. We unknowingly feel we know them all—Marilyn, Jacquie and Elizabeth Taylor.
Warhol was the moth; incessantly drawn into fame’s incandescent light. He further pushed the iconising process already transforming his earthy deities. His re-imagining of them suggest at times, the flattened Eastern religious art of his Byzantine Catholic faith. Few noticed at the time that Warhol attended mass several times a week—sometimes more—for his whole life.
Warhol’s most cherished iconising subjects were potent women. He presented them as utterly unearthly; as distant as any Madonna. New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz says Warhol loved “the power of the feminine.” His images of Liz Taylor “exude a primitive hit of graphic power, stunning colour, seething glamour, repressed sexuality and flawed beauty." On Taylor’s death in 2011, Saltz wrote, “for me... Elizabeth Taylor is Andy Warhol's paintings of her... My mind is flooded with ideas of image manipulation, overexposure, divadom, iconicity, victimhood, vampire, parody, celebrity, cult heroes, lost soul, loving freakiness, queerness and fearlessness.”
With such affected and exaggerated sensibilities, it’s easy to appreciate Warhol as a gay artist in the contemporary sense. Tate Modern’s online notes introduce Warhol, “as a gay man growing up at a time when sex between men was illegal ... [who] embraced New York’s queer community of designers, poets, dancers and artists.”
Such identity-defined categories might help pigeon-hole Warhol’s significance for today’s diversity-aware audiences. Yet, they fail to capture the more nuanced context of his times. They also fail to locate his pioneering importance in contemporary LGBTI- terms.
In the early 60s, the broadly understood meaning of “gay”, was just beginning its long migration from "carefree" to a descriptor for a homosexually-constructed lifestyle. “Queer” was still a term of abuse. From the early 80s, LGBTI people started to reclaim the word for themselves, giving it a defiant political edge.
In social terms, the pioneering days of Pop Art are lightyears away from today. The social revolutions of the sixties were yet to build any heads of steam. The Beatles were yet to explode. The Summer of Love was still over the horizon. And Stonewall (1969) was even further beyond.
In the fading light of the Eisenhower years of the late 50s, two of Pop Art’s great pioneers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, were in a secret relationship. They, like many of the creatives of New York at the time, felt they could “pass”. In truth, Warhol was too swish to conceal his identity. Other creatives readily flung homophobic sledges at him—even if the concept didn’t exist then. Everyone knew he was a fairy—except his mother (who lived with him till she died in 1972!).
Yet in the late fifties, Warhol was freely depicting and publicly exhibiting his orientation through a series of elegantly honest illustrations. In today’s LGBTI terms, these are his truly pioneering works.
The term Camp probably offers a better way to access Warhol’s times and milieu. In 1964, the great cultural writer (and Warhol subject), Susan Sontag published her first significant essay—Notes on Camp. In it, she shone a light on an awareness with a linage down through the demi-mode. Sontag declared, “Many things in the world have not been named;... One of these is the sensibility — unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it — that goes by the cult name of Camp.”
Surprisingly, Sontag did not consider Pop Art to be a good example of Camp. Comparatively, she proclaimed Pop to be “more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic...
Today, Camp’s informing similarities appear more pronounced. Sontag continued, “the Camp eye has the power to transform experience.” Her many examples of Camp included the lurid headlines of the National Enquirer; porn movies, when viewed without gratification!; and the “haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo.” It all sounds familiar.
Sixty years after his significant breakthroughs, Warhol is a historical artefact. Pop was born of a period of unbridled national optimism. America was off to the moon—because it was there! At the very height of Pop’s initial brilliance, Americans entered into a long season of national trauma bought on by ongoing assassinations. The day before an assassin felled Robert Kennedy in 1968, Warhol himself, survived an attempt on his life. Since those early days, Americans have also experienced and absorbed the civil rights movement, the rise of the hippies, Vietnam, the Sexual Revolution, Watergate, Reaganomics, the fall of Communism, 9/11 and the GFC. Today, America is still absorbing the meaning of Trump, Weinstein, Black Lives Matter and now, COVID. The earth has spun many times since the birth of Pop. Lucie Smith feels that "in a strange way, the Tate [Modern] exhibition seems to offer an allegory of the cultural fate of America during [those] long years... “.
Today, everyone is accessing, mediating and communicating unimaginable amounts of data and images with tools Warhol could only dream of—computers, iPhone and iPads, internet, social media platforms. Its easy to imagine Warhol scaling his processes to exploit this utterly new landscape.
So much of what we transmit today is entirely and instantly disposable. If Warhol were alive, he would be busy retrieving the detritus of our electronic lives; only to deconstruct, repackage and re-present to us, as ephemeral cultural markers of our world. He would undoubtedly be revelling in its banalities and bathing in the intoxicating reach of our age.
Today, mass media has less ability to amplify Warhol’s novelty and fame. The centre is no longer as necessary, and he could probably stay in Pittsburg. With Warhol now partially online from Tate Modern in London, the centre is now expanding to include the peripheries.
Warhol
By Klause Honnef
TASCHEN, 2015
Andy Warhol is hailed as the most important proponent of the Pop art movement. A critical and creative observer of American society, he explored key themes of consumerism, materialism, media, and celebrity. Drawing on contemporary advertisements, comic strips, consumer products, and Hollywood's most famous faces, Warhol proposed a radical reevaluation of what constituted artistic subject matter.
At the same time, Warhol reconfigured the role of the artist. Famously stating "I want to be a machine," he systematically reduced the presence of his own authorship, working with mass-production methods and images
Published as part of the TASCHEN Basic Art Series which has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series.
Andy Warhol (Little People, Big Dreams)
by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Illustrated by Timothy Hunt
Frances Lincoln Children's, 2021
32 pages, 4 - 7 years
See how Andy Warhol’s life presents in a children's book recently published as part of the successful, Little People, BIG DREAMS series.
Little Andy was the tiniest and palest child of the Warholas, a humble couple from Slovakia who lived in Pittsburgh. Sketchbook glued to his hand, he loved every minute of drawing, but he was too shy to show his work to others, even to his family! As an adult he got a chance to publish his first illustration for a glamorous magazine. He turned his attention to the ordinary, like soup cans he ate from for lunch every day. He showed the world that the ordinary objects could POP and founded a cultural movement. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the inspiring artist's life.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
By Andy Warhol
Penguin, 2010
In his own words!
In his autobiography, first published in 1975, the private Andy Warhol talks about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success; about New York and America; about himself – his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, good times and bad times in New York, the explosion of his career in the Sixties, and life among celebrities.
“This book is a strange beast, but never fails to interest whether you dip into a section or read it from cover to cover as I did. Warhol didn't actually write the book, just as he didn't actually paint most of his works himself. He had a tape recorder into which he poured his thoughts, and an assistant with whom he worked to transcribe and edit what he chose to publish.” — K.A. Wheatley, Amazon review
Four Pair cotton dress socks. Made from combed cotton for a comfortable feel. Come in themed gift box.
"Art is what you can get away with". Andy Warhol Foundation tote, includes three Warhol themed pins. Constructed in heavy gauge cotton canvas and sturdy red strap.
"Great Andy Warhol at a good price"
— German Amazon review.
100% Soft Cotton, with gift pack. Effectively blocks light allowing eyes to blink freely. With an ergonomic design, it’s hypoallergenic, suitable those with sensitive skin. Look great, while sleeping undisturbed on a plane.
No one will ever guess it's you!
Art is what you can get away with.
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings... and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
What's great about this country is that... the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.
I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.
Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.