Few American artists have had careers as influential and controversial as Andy Warhol (1928‱987). In the nearly quarter-century since his death, his quirky persona has often seemed to overwhelm his art, but it has also contributed to enduring interest in his work. Museum and gallery exhibitions exploring facets of his output continue to draw eager crowds.
A case in point is “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade,” comprising more than 50 works that reveal the energy, vitality and experimentation of his late career. Organized for the Milwaukee Art Museum by its former chief curator and now Emerson College art professor Joseph D. Ketner II, and already seen in Milwaukee and at the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, it is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through September 12.
Most writings and exhibitions about Warhol have focused on the eight-year Pop period of his career. This show, the first to zero in on the artist’s concluding years, seeks to rectify that imbalance by offering new perspectives on that phase. “When we examine the last decade of Warhol’s career, we witness a mature artist bringing his own oeuvre full circle, sweeping the early images for which he is so well known into a complex dance of painting and printing, abstraction and representation, surface and meaning,” suggests Ketner.
Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Penn., Warhol studied art there at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1945‱949, before moving to New York City, where he foreshortened his name. Working for 13 years as a commercial illustrator and department store window designer, he honed his skills as a draftsman, won significant awards and was well compensated by prestigious clients.
At the same time, with an eye on a career in the fine arts, Warhol continued to draw, paint and make collages, often incorporating commercial techniques into his processes.
By the early 1960s, influenced by the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and other artists moving away from the prevailing Abstract Expressionism, Warhol began adapting advertising and comic book images as subjects for painting.
After briefly applying painterly brushwork to images of such comic-strip characters as Popeye, Superman and Dick Tracy, he used smooth, impersonal finishes to depict a wide range of subjects, including Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills, stamps, newspaper pages and dance-step diagrams. These were often in multiple images, arranged like postage stamps and in idiosyncratic colors.
Warhol soon began to reproduce his work in quantity using silkscreen techniques. While many were single images, some were in multiples, an allusion to modern industrial techniques of reproduction. Underscoring the impersonal nature of his art, he called his Manhattan studio The Factory.
While leading an apparently indolent life †few people ever saw him actually work †he remained highly prolific, organizing ever-larger studios at The Factory, employing many friends as assistants and courtiers. Warhol made films, ran a night club and rock band, and schmoozed with glitterati from the entertainment world. Meanwhile, fascinated by stardom, Warhol became a supercelebrity in his own right.
After surviving an attempt on his life in 1968, Warhol turned his studio practice into a commissioned portrait and film business, and enlarged his painting subject matter to include cows and flowers. In his oft-quoted prediction that “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” he offered his response to the media coverage he often encountered, noting its destabilizing effect on personal identity.
About the time he turned 50 in 1978, Warhol undertook a critical assessment of his life and career that led to radical changes in his art. During his last decade, he expanded his artistic and business ventures, experienced an extraordinary period of creativity in printmaking, fashion and television, and created a little-known body of personal paintings. He took up abstraction, returned to painting by hand and launched a dialogue between abstract and figurative painting.
This new phase began in 1977‱978 with his “Oxidation Painting” series, an important transformational effort. It was, says Ketner, “a departure of seismic proportions from his screened Pop images and society portraits.”
This series involved urinating on canvases primed with copper-based paint. Depending on how the urine oxidized on the still-wet reddish or gold-metallic surfaces, it produced various shades of green or other colors in blobs, streaks, swirls or drops. Art critic Gregory Volk pronounces these works, such as “Oxidation Painting (in 12 parts),” “strikingly gorgeous&⁴hey have an intricate and varied visuality that one normally would not associate with Warhol.” They also constitute a take-off on the drips and splatters of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist paintings that were all the rage at the time.
From time to time, Warhol, a devout Catholic, invoked religious themes in his work, as exemplified by acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas images of crosses and eggs in the early 1980s. It is suggested that works like “Eggs,” 1982, with multicolored ovals assembled in an abstract composition, refer to Easter and the rebirth of Christ.
Warhol returned to Pollock’s classic drips in his “Yarn” series of 1983, screen prints based on unraveled skeins of colorful yarn in overall images like Pollock’s. The next year Warhol experimented with “Rorschach” images, in which he enlarged inkblot studies into monumental, monochromatic abstract paintings.
Around this time Warhol was influenced by interactions with several prominent artists of the day, and collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960‱988) and Francesco Clemente (b 1952) on several works.
The older man, fascinated by the energy, facility and imagery of Basquiat, the Afro-Caribbean former graffiti painter, worked with him on several highly innovative and inventive acrylics. His close association with the younger artist reenergized Warhol’s interest in direct painting and in the contemporary art world.
Warhol and Basquiat also teamed with Clemente, an Italian-born figure painter, in a process in which each artist started four canvases, which were then circulated to the others for their contributions. The result was 15 striking mixed media works that incorporated Basquiat’s slashing brushstrokes and graffiti, Clemente’s lyrical figures and Warhol’s facile advertising images and company logos. Critical reaction to the “Collaborations” was negative, however, and the team broke up in 1985.
These associations with up-and-coming artists concerned, challenged and energized Warhol. He wrote in his diary, “I got so nervous thinking about all these new kids painting away and me just going to parties, I figured I’d better get cracking.” As Ketner observes, “Warhol’s paranoia was exacerbated by the success of others.” Volk adds that as Warhol emerged from these friendships and collaborations, “he flourished in the 1980s with renewed vigor and experimentation&⁗hat one very much detects is a flowing and innovative imagination that yielded a host of works worthy of sustained attention and acclaim.”
As an outgrowth of the “Collaborations,” Warhol undertook his “Black & White Ads,” 1985‱986, which melded hand painted and mechanically screened images. “In this series,” says Ketner, “he again scanned his past for Pop-styled images culled from newspapers and magazines, which seemed to represent poignant signs of current mass culture and also issues of personal significance.”
They ranged from product ads for the likes of motorcycles and Campbell’s Soup to trendy activities like bodybuilding and alternate medicines to sociopolitical commentaries on the burgeoning federal deficit and global militarism. He also created personal pieces, never shown in his lifetime, that reflected the depth of his religious convictions. They bear such evangelical-sounding titles as “Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away!” and “Repent and Sin No More.”
In a great burst of activity in 1986, both his most productive and last year of his life, he carried out three major projects: the “Camouflage” series, “The Last Supper” paintings and the fright-wig “Self-Portraits.” They constitute, Ketner observes, “a full range of abstract and representational imagery, created by both hand and screen print.”
The “Camouflage” group, based on tracings from mesh camouflage applied with acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvases or linen, range from the look of regular army colors to delicate pastel patterns to exuberantly hued designs. He also worked the motif into several of his final paintings, including “The Last Supper” and a “Self-Portrait.”
Although he had previously produced religious imagery, only in “The Last Supper” paintings did Warhol reveal his spirituality. Ketner notes how rare it is for an “avant-garde artist to treat religious subjects with the sincerity of his or her convictions.” He adds that this series of some 100 works, on which Warhol worked for more than a year, is “the most ambitious body of religious paintings of the Twentieth Century.”
Implementing a commission from a Greek art dealer whose gallery in Milan was across the street from the site of Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco “The Last Supper,” circa 1495‱498, Warhol decided to base his work not on Leonardo’s original, but on facsimiles and reproductions. He specifically worked from a turn-of-the-Twentieth Century chromolithograph, says Ketner, which he “deemed to be the ideal source.” In differentiating his work by replicating a reproduction of the original, Warhol avoided comparison with the iconic original itself.
For the installation in Milan, Warhol created a suite of screen prints and three large screened paintings, all of which were variations on the chromolithograph. The three acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen versions, each measuring 78 by 306 inches, were bathed in either a red or yellow glow or covered by army-style camouflage.
Particularly after the 1968 assassination attempt, Warhol became increasingly preoccupied with the subject of death and his own mortality. Ketner said, “Although he obsessed over death and rejection&⁛Warhol] hid behind his mask and immersed himself in his work.”
The artist’s final series of self-likenesses in 1986, the year before he died, focus on his unruly, white fright wig and haunted face that seems to sense that the end is near. They are like death masks.
Different takes on the theme include a “Self-Portrait” with camouflage that partly obscures his bespectacled visage and multiple images in which he is being strangled.
Warhol died in New York in February 1987 from unexpected complications following routine gall bladder surgery. Today, nearly a quarter-century after his death, Warhol remains a figure of debate and controversy. Many consider him and his art kooky, banal and commercial. Countless others find his work powerful and persuasive and regard the way he undermined modern artistic priorities as important and refreshing.
Curator Ketner, perhaps, deserves the last word, observing that Warhol’s late outpouring of creativity “prefigured much of the new painting that would appear in subsequent decades. His late paintings introduced new forms of abstraction and a return to figuration&⁈e established a model for the cross-media and media-driven art practice that characterizes today’s ahistorical, contemporary art world, in which issues of medium, style, abstraction and figuration are essentially irrelevant.”
After closing in Brooklyn, “The Last Decade” makes its final stop at the Baltimore Museum of Art, October 17⁊anuary 9.
The 223-page exhibition catalog is published by the Milwaukee Art Museum and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing. It sells for $60, hardcover.
The Brooklyn Museum is at 200 Eastern Parkway. For information, 718-638-5000 or www.brooklynmuseum.org .
