Word: warhols
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...sense of deja vu one gets from the show is hardly the curator's fault. It is built into the career itself. Warhol's paintings came out of a culture of mass production and reproduction, and have been run back through it so widely and often that they contain very few surprises. With a few piercing exceptions, they seem generic. His Mona Lisas are by now as famous as Leonardo's, especially for people who don't care much for old art. (Except that, for a lot of the audience, they are old art -- mysterious icons of the remote...
...Warhol began and ended as a commercial illustrator; what lies between is the interesting stuff. He was an adroit draftsman but not a distinguished one. He soon overcame the influences of his early advertising days (Jean Cocteau and Ben Shahn), but the drawing is never more than efficient. Partly for this reason his freehand "studies" of soup cans or dollar bills never acquire the pressure of the silk-screened ones, but it is hard to see how they could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments...
...Warhol's power, uneven as it was, lay in an emotional narrative that contradicted its cold, fixed, iconic surface. He unskeined a story in which a horror of the world, verging sometimes on acute dread, mingled with an artificial calm and a desire for transcendence. Try as one may, one cannot imagine Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, being painted by anyone but a Roman Catholic homosexual; it is both completely camp in its pseudo-Byzantine extravagance and, in its identification of the star with the Madonna, yearningly devotional. Here, Warhol is Genet in paint. So too with the "disasters...
...intensity of these early images is closely linked to the rapture with which Warhol first discovered his own ability to use detachment -- to make art with what he had, out of his sense that high art had actually dissolved into mass media. When this ceased to surprise him, his work came too pat. It coarsened and turned industrial. Even his later images of foreboding and death, like the skulls, are trashily melodramatic by comparison with what had gone before, while his inflated recyclings of Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Leonardo's Last Supper could scarcely be more pointless...
...Reassessing the best and worst of Andy Warhol...