Andy Warhol

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

 

introduction | Fabi’s Statue of Liberty | Ambulance Disaster | Telephone | Ten-Foot Flowers | Mao | Elvis I & II

 

Warhol was a master draftsman in 1942, at the age of 14 (or 11 or 12). The decisive encounter with commercial art introduced him to Surrealism in the form of shoes, handbags, etc.1On occasion, in his paid illustrations, a hand as fine as any shows itself.

The revelation of his art comes as a flurry of works in which the hand applies itself to commercial and popular themes. The next decisive encounter (with photosilkscreen printing) freed the eye and enabled an approach to industrialism. Analysis by variation, applications of color, the rational application of visual content, the invisible made visible, etc.

The last decisive encounter was with fame. The line attains self-consciousness (The Last Supper).

It’s a biscuit company, with a logo that fits on everything, even the Statue of Liberty, who (we are told) has never had her head on straight since the day she was installed in New York Harbor, and neither the American Bicentennial nor Lee Iacocca (nor even the steelworker who kissed her nose) could sort her out properly.

 

Fabi's Statue of Liberty 1986 50 x 68 in. Silkscreen ink, acrylic on canvas Stiftung Sammlung Marx, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin

Ambulance Disaster 1963 Silkscreen ink, acrylic paint on canvas 124 x 80 in. Stiftung Sammlung Marx, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin

Two flickers of a frame set to marginalize this existence, whether you imagine it as cold-blooded and merciless, or (still and all) as bedeviled by all the joys in a sort of anti-chorus laughing at our misfortunes. “That’s ironic,” they say from the fertile vantage point of a false security, the one that doesn’t count, because it can’t be counted on…

The thing made is most poetic. Don Ameche is in the next frame, seeking perhaps (who knows?) Watson, who had not heard the call so clearly before.

Telephone 1961 Acrylic and pencil on canvas 72 x 54 in. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Ten-Foot Flowers 1967 Silkscreen ink, acrylic paint on canvas 120 x 120 in. Stiftung Sammlung Marx, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin

“I'll tell you how I happened to make the blown-up flowers. In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York. At that time I saw a painting by Fantin-Latour, a still-life with flowers I found very beautiful, but I realized that were I to paint the same flowers so small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them—and they did." (Georgia O’Keefe)

Alain Bosquet, Conversations with Dali

 

A.B.: Does your glory lack Mao Tse-tung?

S.D.: Especially Mao Tse-tung.

 

* * *

 

S.D.: Mao Tse-Tung is a supremely cultivated person;  it would be my task to make him a wee bit surrealist. Oh what vertigo would be mine!

Mao 1973 Silkscreen ink, acrylic paint on canvas 176 ½ x 136 ¼ in. Stiftung Sammlung Marx, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin

 

Elvis I and II. 1964. Acrylic and silkscreened ink on canvas

 

You can’t get enough of Elvis. Fourfold in two dimensions, in the posture for which he is so famous, or an anagram thereof: as John Wayne, threatening the stale perceptions of a dull half-civilized epoch. The stature is life-size, in color and in outline.

 

1 Dali is asked, “does the mystical ever reside in a hat?” Dali replies, “it always resides in hats.” Also, “if you were obliged to worship an everyday object as a relic, what would it be?”  “A pair of shoes.”

 

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