Warhol

Andy Warhol’s paintings of Brillo boxes might have made art popular, but they have nothing to do with art. He had a different goal. He made this clear when asked, "What you do want?'' Patrick Smith, author of "Warhol: Conversations About the Artist,'' did the asking: "You've got everything: You have crowds, hordes, young people, beautiful people, charming people, rich people, lovely people. Nobody seems to touch you. What do you want?'' Warhol answered, “I want more fame.''

And he acted out that wanting. He used to sit in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan dolled up in wild white wigs, sunglasses and a James Dean leasther jacket, hoping to be noticed.

Also helping him get noticed were the celebrity portraits he painted, like Marilyn Monroe's after she died and Jackie Kennedy Onassis' after she was widowed. Following the deaths of Monroe and President Kennedy, Warhol began his "Disaster Series,'' such as the "Electric Chair.'' After he was shot by one of his groupies, his work grew still darker with images of skull, gun and knife.

You might think that such imagery reflects on the violence in America society, but not if you take seriously the words of his assistant, Gerard Malanga. Each painting in the "Disaster Series'' took about four minutes, he said. "We worked as mechanically as we could, but we made mistakes. The critics interpreted them as intentional.''

Worshipful words from critic Carter Ratcliff come to mind: "Warhol is secretly the vehicle of artistic intentions so complex that he would probably cease to function if he didn't dilute them with nightly doses of the inane.''

Warhol's own words deny such intentions: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he famously said, “just look at the surface of my paintings . . . There's nothing below it . . . I want to be a machine.''

He wasn’t kidding. He attacked individuality, originality and everything else that art was in the '60s, and the real thing never quite recovered.

If it weren’t for the recent exhibit of Warhol's work at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, I wouldn't have brought him up. His art of slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the emotional excesses of Baroque art at Florida’s Ringling Museum running there for relief.
It was no accident that Warhol used silkscreen prints for his celebrity portraits, including those of Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie and Martha Graham. With such a reprinting technique, he could reproduce an image over and over for the most stale, impersonal look. Warhol repeated his images in mechanical reproduction ad nauseum with photographic enlargements that he silkscreened onto canvas. He made wallpaper-pattern reprints of these, glorifying their sameness and their mass-production.

This muse-less master of the mundane repeated the look of Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles just as he had the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband's assassination. He made wallpaper out of her image, too. And in the repetition, he numbed our perception. He gave us aesthetic emptiness.

He once said that anything is boring if you look at it long enough. He loved being bored and wanted to be a machine - blank and cold. In the catalogue for his first retrospective show in '68, held at the Moerna Museet, Stockholm, he said, "I like boring things . . . 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."

I could cry – not only over what Warhol did, but because Pop Art lives on extolling banality, deifying detachment and disassociation. Gone is metaphor, allusion, that part of life that lies beneath outward appearance. When Leonardo painted his celebrated ``Virgin of the Rocks,'' he added a soft glow emanating from within the figure. It beats any depiction of a halo. There's more to art than messages. There's mystery. I just wish Pop Art would go away, already.

No such luck. Art, the so-called food of the soul, is processed now, far from fresh and as far removed from human experience as a TV screen, and I blame Warhol. This Chauncy Gardiner of picturemaking, who liked to watch life rather than live it, succeeded in turning art into a banality that deifies detachment. I'm thinking of the 3-foot-tall mound of synthetic excrement and the splotch of plastic vomit seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the ‘90s. I hold Warhol's deadpan expressions accountable for such crap.

Not that Pop wasn’t OK in the '60s, when it first burst onto the art scene out of rebellion against abstract expressionism's messy inwardness. But by now, I miss the Zen-like calligraphy of Robert Motherwell, who pioneered abstract expressionism. He was my teacher, so I'm probably biased, but I miss a&e’s ampageousness.

I shuddered at the news a couple of years ago when a Warhol; painting of a Campbell soup can , sold at a Christie’s auction for $11.7 million. Bad enough that he imitated soup cans. But it wasn't even his idea. In a Warhol biography in '89, author Victor Bockris related the genesis of the soup can paintings.

Warhol had just come out of a "nervous breakdown" and feared he might be slipping towards another after seeing a show of fellow Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures of underwear, ice cream and pies. Warhol was upset because he didn't think of it.

The soup can paintings came out of a conversation between Warhol and a struggling interior designer Muriel Latow. Warhol was intent on doing something big in art, but he didn't know what.

Warhol: "It's too late for the cartoons," he said, alluding to the fact that Roy Lichtenstein already was doing that. "I've got to do something that will have a lot of impact, that will be different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing. I don't know what to do! Muriel, you've got fabulous ideas. Can't you give me an idea?"

(She agreed if he would pay her for the idea).

Warhol: "How much?"

Latow: "Fifty dollars."

Warhol: "OK, go ahead," he said after writing out a check. "Give me a fabulous idea!"

Latow: "What do you like most in the whole world?"

Warhol: "I don't know. What do I like most in the whole world?"

Latow: "Money. You should paint pictures of money."

Warhol: "Oh gee, that really is a great idea"

Latow: "You should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes --- like a can of soup."

Fifty dollarsa turned out to be the bargain of the century when you consider the market value of Warhol’s work. – a head-scratcher, especially of you compare the $11.7 million for his soup can to auction sales of work by painters like Picasso and Monet. Picasso's "Le Repos" painted in 1932, said to be his greatest period, fetched $7.9 million. Monet's "Matinee Sur la Seine," part of a series that was the precursor to the famous "Waterlilies" series, sold for $5,725,750. Warhol outsold Picasso and Monet.

Muriel Latow was gypped.