The Cause of Wit in Others

John Haber
in New York City

Andy Warhol in Retrospective

Even for Andy Warhol, who reinvented himself more than any retrospective can say, Ethel Scull 36 Times was a breakthrough. He made sure that Scull could break out as well.

It was a silkscreen, thirty-six times over, from an artist forever linked to repetition and reproduction. Warhol had adopted the medium just months before—and then for only a few multiples of a single iconic image, like Marlon Brando as The Wild One or Elvis Presley in a Western shoot-out. It applies acrylic to flatten its multiples, where more painterly handling had taken his earlier icons to the breaking point, like Marilyn Monroe in a diptych that fades from garish color to black and from black to erasure. It was a portrait of wealth, for an artist who stands more than anyone for the confluence of art and money today, but he was still new to commissions in 1963. True, he had survived on commercial illustration since graduating Carnegie Tech and leaving Pittsburgh for New York in 1949, but he had given that up to become an artist. He would make up how as he went along.

He worked from photographs, as an artist for whom real life is always an image, and Scull was fine with that. She expected to pose in his studio all the same, for a proper portrait. And then he took her to a photo booth in Times Square, the place of filth and freak shows. It freed her up to gesture and to laugh, with much the same rhythms as Warhol's rapid-fire background colors. Like Falstaff, he was not only witty in himself, "but the cause that wit is in other men." Make that also gay men like himself and women.

Across, against, between

Make that, too, the cause of fear and trembling. When he moved his studio up a block or two from Union Square in 1974, he and assistants boxed up its contents as a time capsule. It included books of Marcel Duchamp and Cy Twombly, but also a Beatles coloring book and a not so hit single by Ultra Violet. It included the avant-garde along with the ephemeral, the sordid with the sophisticated—because Andy Warhol plays across, against, and between them all. Everything at the Whitney flies by at a headlong pace, because so did everything about his life and career. "Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again" (after the subtitle to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol) holds three hundred fifty objects, and it opens by reeling off the media with which he produced thousands more.

Did you know him only for screen prints? The retrospective takes him from skilled drawing for the fashion industry and friends to TV, film, and experimental media, like Mylar cylinders that might have looked more at home beside a disco ball. It takes him from Pop Art to the often touted death of painting, but with Warhol grappling with painting's future every step of the way. He claimed to have given it up once in 1965, just three years after his first solo show, and again in 1971—only to have it become more enigmatic and ubiquitous. It takes him, too, from downtown to Studio 54 and from the Velvet Underground to MTV. He had a way, everywhere and nowhere, of making himself at home.

It takes him from the promise of the Kennedy administration to the Kennedy assassination—and from the promise of the 1964 World's Fair to the blankness of camouflage and Rorschach tests. One by its very nature conceals and one reveals, but conceals or reveals what? Warhol is not saying. This is and is not America. It takes him, too, past the assassination attempt in 1968 that nearly cost him his life at the hands of Valerie Solanas, a self-appointed radical feminist, critic, and acolyte. And then he made himself start over, only to die of something as banal as gall bladder surgery in 1987, at age fifty-eight.

He had a way of living in public while keeping to himself. Where Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Twombly kept their gay identity and indeed their person out of the picture, he refused to be closeted while also refusing to take himself as subject, apart from a few studiously cool self-portraits—the first on canvas after penny photos in Times Square, near the "museum of the grotesque" that attracted Diane Arbus. If you an artist and were lucky enough to meet him, like Duncan Hannah, he would most likely have changed the subject to you and your work. It was in part his insatiable curiosity and unfailing courtesy, what made him a mentor to his Factory. It made him, depending on what history you read, a cutting-edge artist or the betrayal of art. It made him by his death more of a marginal figure with a hairpiece but never less than present.

Was he ever less than exemplary? You just may not agree on what he exemplified. His early commercial clients included I. Miller, the shoe company, and he made shoes look sordid but sexy, with a touch of gold leaf and foil along with ink. He made men and woman sordid but sexy, too, and he could easily have become instead a stylish caricaturist. He broke out initially in Pop Art, with that first solo show of his Campbell's Soup Cans in LA. He had a knack for spotting the icons of popular culture and American desire—and doing his share to create them. Other early subjects included Coca-Cola bottles and dollar bills, followed by Brando, Presley, Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. Yet they have their way of fading into white.

He worked with and against painting, too. The Whitney sees smears in his first Pop Art as duly following Abstract Expressionism, but he could just as well be smudging or erasing it. He copies advertising, like James Rosenquist, and a superhero from the comics, like Roy Lichtenstein, but effacing them, too. His Brillo boxes, in screen prints on custom-made plywood, pick up Minimalism but as consumer good. His late camouflage should have anyone thinking of colors for Lee Krasner and his Oxidation Paintings, or piss paintings, of Jackson Pollock drips. He takes after those he admires and only those he admires, and then he leaves it to others to call it sympathy, satire, or selling out.

Sexuality and camouflage

Has there ever not been a Warhol retrospective—with yet another focused on claims for Warhol's religion coming up in Brooklyn? He stage-managed his first in 1971. (He insisted that everything, including flower paintings, hang against his cow wallpaper. The Whitney's curator, Donna De Salvo, already staged another soon after his death. Since then, he has had one in London, in 2002 at Tate Modern, and in Berlin. "Regarding Warhol" amounted to another, at the Met in 2012. It placed him among sixty artists spanning fifty years, much as MoMA placed Rauschenberg among friends in 2017.

That does not count one show after another—of the Rorschach paintings, Warhol's last decade, and his Screen Tests. The Whitney retrospective opens alongside a display of his chilling, absorbing, near abstract Shadows, which first exhibited in Soho in 1979 (from the more than one hundred screen prints meant to adapt in smaller numbers to any location). Fittingly for the former fashion illustrator, they hang in the office of Calvin Klein before returning to Dia:Beacon. And that leaves Warhol seemingly everywhere, on the secondary market and in unauthorized prints. He has been everywhere, too, in criticism, for and against. If this review falls short, I link to past efforts to pin him down.

Does the world really need another Warhol retrospective? I doubt it, but it depends on just what you think has kept him in the public eye. For the Whitney, it is largely his sexuality and his camouflage. Together, they make him relevant to Postmodernism and today. For a gay artist of his time, they may well go together. Each of three floors takes its stab at sorting them out.

The lobby gallery has portraits from 1971, for the art-world version of glamour, high society, and paying the bills. It is the output that I would most like to forget, although a short wall upstairs has something like it, with covers from Interview magazine. The third floor has TV and film, at the cost of burying both. You may never stumble on Empire—the interminable and thrilling night view of the Empire State Building that places him firmly in the avant-garde film company of Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, and others. You are more likely to remember that he started his own TV show. That leaves the Whitney's largest floor for a career survey.

It tempers chronology with theme, because Warhol turned out so much in so short a time before the gunshot wounds. It gives ample space to his commercial and private illustrations, including selfies from the 1950s in drag. His Dance Diagrams from 1962, set on the floor, look different after all those shoes. LGBT identity comes into focus in 1975 with Ladies and Gentlemen, portraits of a trans rights activist. Already, though, he used his commission for Philip Johnson's New York State pavilion at the World's Fair for silkscreens of Most Wanted Men. Most wanted has to mean both most dangerous and most desired.

As for camouflage, the fifth floor opens with a mural on the theme, and it is huge. Imagine everything that follows as a confession but also a disguise. He enters politics with posters for George McGovern, but he descended to bland images of Chairman Mao, many times over, not to state a personal preference, but to keep up with the spectacle of Nixon in China. Prints include a brick wall and masks as well. Camouflage also covers The Last Supper, and Warhol did have a Byzantine Catholic upbringing. I have to think, though, that the work has more to do with the changing face of art.

Near death experience

Does even that make him exemplary? He was never the inventor of Pop Art. (Leave that to Johns or Rauschenberg.) He has, though, had no shortage of claims for and against him. For Arthur C. Danto, he exemplified a crucial change in art, from visual to conceptual density. Danto singled out his Brillo boxes as visually indiscernible from the originals.

As Joseph Masheck insists, I doubt that anyone has made that mistake. Silkscreen has a matte crudeness that alone calls attention to Warhol's hand. And then there are those for whom he stands for everything that has gone wrong with art. For Tom Wolfe or Robert Hughes, he had only a glib excuse for painting that led directly to the likes of Keith Haring and Jeff Koons. And while that attack comes from the right, artists, too, can take the betrayal personally. An art magazine has even called him responsible for Donald J. Trump.

That sounds a bit much, to say the least, although it does have the advantage of making art important. It overlooks, though, Warhol's place in so many currents. It overlooks, too, the sincerity and the camouflage. It ascribes financial motives that he could never have had—not when he was taking Ethel Scull to Times Square. Trump might see himself in the solid gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan. Warhol would not.

More important still, it overlooks his penetrating ambivalence toward himself, art, and America. He loves art when he admires Twombly and approaches abstraction, with camouflage or a white Mona Lisa. When he adds monochrome cells to a silkscreen, the Whitney argues, he shows his love for painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman. And then he charged extra for each cell that he added. It could be cynical or critical of buyers, but it is also still another effacement of the image. And each effacement is an act of violence.

Nothing runs more through his art than American violence. It appears in the wanted posters, Brando, Presley, and reminders of Monroe's untimely demise—or in a self-portrait not in the show, undergoing strangulation. It appears even earlier in a magazine commission on the subject of heroine and in a hand-rendered headline, 139 Die in Jet! It appears at its most chilling in Disasters, Car Crashes, Mustard Race Riots, and Electric Chairs. When he collaborates with Jean-Michel Basquiat, the latter supplies a skeleton, and Warhol turns to skulls and shadows. Even the Rorschach ink blots look skeletal.

Both subjects, art and death, animate his fascination with Jackie Kennedy—the a skull in the Jack Shear drawing collection. He first reproduced the Mona Lisa because she helped bring it to Washington and New York, and then came Dallas. She could stand at once for hopes to introduce fine art to the public and for its tabloid debasement. She could stand as well for the price of entering the spotlight. So, too, could Warhol. Maybe he could never quite look it in the face again after his near death experience, but he could feel its shadow.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Andy Warhol ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through March 31, 2019, "Shadows" at 205 West 39th Street through December 15, 2018. Related reviews cover Warhol here, here, here, here, and here.