Accident & Design
Warhol
Tate Modern
7 February to 1 April 2002
£10 (concessions £8)
ANDY WARHOL’S images have appeared in magazines, on TV,
clothes and billboards. Everywhere. Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt. Yet
the visual impact of his best work is stunning: fresh colours, great composition
and thought-provoking subjects. Tate Modern’s exhibition reveals Warhol as one
of the most significant artists of the 20th century.
Starting with the earliest drawings from the 1940s and
1950s, it covers a great decade from 1962, when Warhol revolutionised art. Then
carries on through the lows and less frequent highs of the later 1970s up to his
death in 1987. A warts-and-all approach.
Along the way, Warhol defined modern-day USA, consciously or
unconsciously exposing the ambiguities of US society. The amount of material he
produced is phenomenal: film, audio, paintings and prints, time capsules,
collections, books and interviews. There’s a driven need to get things down. A
feeling that time is running out.
Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 to immigrants
from Ruthenia, now in the Slovak Republic. It was a working-class family, part
of a close-knit Catholic community. Following a free scholarship, he majored in
pictorial design in 1949 and moved to New York, his possessions in a paper bag.
He became a window dresser, book illustrator and commercial artist, commanding
high fees from publications such as Glamour, Vogue and the New York Times.
Warhol took his fascination with mass production methods and
applied them to art, even calling his succession of studios, the Factory. He
developed innovative techniques. Projecting photographic images onto a silk
screen, he traced the outline, added colour and used displaced multiple copies
to blur the effect. His breakthroughs made art more accessible to artists,
audiences and their interaction.
Warhol’s subjects were quintessentially American. His 32
Campbell’s soup cans depict mass produced fodder for the masses. They are
hand-painted, produced shortly before his silkscreen innovations allowed him to
mass produce pictures of mass production later in 1962. There are dollar bills
and Coca-Cola bottles alongside the icons churned out by the Hollywood machine.
These are the most familiar works, often taken as uncritical
reflections of the American Dream. As Warhol said, ‘no amount of money can get
you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking’. A
celebration of Western capitalist democracy!
To understand art it must be put in its historical and
social context. That won’t necessarily affect whether we like it or not –
that’s down to individual taste – but it can help evaluate its significance.
Warhol realised very quickly the nature of the post-war world. This was the
beginning of mass media. He seemed to understand the power of the repeated
image, the action replay, in a way that few, if any, had done before.
This concept can be taken for granted in the 21st century, a
time of interactive TV and almost instantaneous satellite links around the
planet. The possibility for anyone to be ‘world famous for fifteen minutes’
has been realised. For someone to have grasped that in the early 1960s, however,
is quite astonishing.
But even the pictures of the icons are not clear-cut. Warhol
painted Marilyn Monroe after her death on 5 August 1962. Marilyn Diptych has the
movie star persona on the left, side-by-side with a scratchy, fading-out
monochrome version on the right. It’s a fragile, tragic image.
The Disaster series of 1963 are powerful pictures based on
press photographs. Tunafish Disaster is about two women workers who died of food
poisoning. In White Disaster I, a car burns in the foreground. A black man hangs
from a telegraph pole. It looks like a lynching. According to Tate Modern’s
curator, he had been flung from the car and impaled. A man walks past, seemingly
unperturbed.
There are car crashes. Is there a more poignant symbol of
the US than the automobile? Mass production and freedom. Potentially fatal. A
smashed-up ambulance has half-regurgitated a woman’s body, hanging out of the
broken window. These are tales of everyday folk. Not the rich and famous usually
associated with Warhol.
Race Riot – from a photo of a civil-rights demonstration
– shows police attacking black protesters, letting loose their dogs. There’s
a room full of pictures of the electric chair. Different sizes and colour
combinations. The sign on the wall behind this instrument of judicial death
reads, Silence. Blank coloured panels are placed adjacent. Disquieting. The
repeated image, often criticised for desensitising reactions to catastrophic
events, seems to emphasise and harangue. Of course, throughout, Warhol offers no
overt analysis. No explicit comment. Just images.
Still in 1963, Warhol made his first three films, Sleep,
Eat, and Blow Job, and moved into the first Factory on East 47th Street. In 1964
he was asked to produce pictures for the New York World Fair. The result is
Thirteen Most Wanted Men (a gay pun), large portraits of the FBI’s hit-list.
They are considered inappropriate by the organisers. Instead of replacing them,
Warhol leaves them, painting over them with silver paint.
Empire is a movie of the Empire State Building shot from an
office opposite. As the hours pass, the lighting changes with the time of day
and lights go on and off. Edited highlights feature in this exhibition but, as
Warhol cautioned, his films were often more interesting to think about than to
actually watch. The Factory became infamous, a venue for young artists,
drop-outs and admirers, hedonistic. In 1966, Warhol launched the rock group,
Velvet Underground, featuring Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico, at a multi-media
event.
On 3 June, 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Warhol because she
feared he was going to produce a film based on one of her scripts without
consulting her. Warhol was pronounced dead but survived after several hours of
surgery. Many people say that he never fully recovered from his injuries.
By the mid-1970s Warhol was churning out silkscreens of the
rich and famous, earning astronomical amounts of money. He assembled time
capsules, storing everyday objects, documents and letters. There are 610 by the
time he dies.
There is a loss of focus in some of his later work. But some
of the silkscreen portraits are still very striking, his late self-portraits,
too. His Shadow pictures (1978) are, as they suggest, paintings of shadows.
Repetition gives each a different perspective. A sprinkling of fine diamond dust
gives substance to these portrayals of nothing. These, and re-workings of
Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, all-but round off this comprehensive
retrospective.
Warhol died unexpectedly, aged 58, on 22 February 1987 in a
New York hospital following a routine gall bladder operation. Ironically, having
checked-in as Bob Roberts, he died anonymously and unrecorded.
Warhol was enigmatic, to say the least. Ambiguous. In many
ways an outsider, he was the centre of attention for years. He seemed to live
life on his own terms, for example, never hiding his homosexuality, when many
others did in the 1950s. At the same time, he was a devout Catholic.
Warhol has attracted criticism from the left. He lived
through the Vietnam war without making any major statements on the conflict. He
made money – his estate was valued at $600 million. He socialised equally with
radicals and extreme reactionaries, the Shah of Iran, for instance.
A valuation of the person, however, is different to a
valuation of the art. Warhol developed radically new artistic techniques, which
have influenced artists the world over. This exhibition shows Warhol as the
definitive chronicler of post-war America. He was not overtly political. He was
– or at least seemed – detached. He observed. He recorded. Andy Warhol left
it up to us to evaluate and feel.
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