Andy Warhol / Stars, Deaths, and Disasters

Wednesday, 16 November 2005 10:57

MINNEAPOLIS.-From Civil Rights marchers attacked by police dogs on the pages of LIFE Magazine to footage of Vietnam, to the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the iconic face of Marilyn Monroe, the early sixties were a time of mediated mayhem. Tabloid headlines and nightly news reports presented images that would have existed a decade earlier only in the imagination. At this same time, Andy Warhol made a pivotal shift that reflected this mass production of arresting images—from handmade painting to work created through the new mechanical process of photo-silkscreening. ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964," the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized by the Walker Art Center, brings together 26 paintings that, befitting the early 1960s, feature images of both tragic celebrity (Marilyn Monroe and the widowed Jackie Kennedy) and everyday disasters and tragedies (car wrecks, electric chairs, and murderers). Premiering at the Walker, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Considered one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, Warhol was intimately involved in the early genesis of Pop Art in New York, creating a body of work spanning three decades that addressed American culture’s unequaled fascination with celebrity and the tragedy of anonymous “disasters” in a world defined by the increasingly voracious and virulent expansion of popular mass media. He was one of the first American artists to investigate this cultural morbid obsession with violence, tragedy, and death in a body of silkscreen paintings that drew their source materials from the magazines, films, and tabloids of American pop and filtered them through a painterly technique that employed photographic silkscreen reproduction. Warhol’s early use of this technique established his revolutionary contribution to both art history and contemporary art. Warhol’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe began just after her suicide on August 5, 1962, at the same time that he began making silkscreen paintings. His numerous impressions of Marilyn rendered in single and multiple formats, derived from an iconic black-and-white publicity image of the movie star, were, according to the artist, related to the theme of death. As he suggested in ARTnews magazine in November 1963, “I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper; 129 DIE. I was also painting Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death.” On view in the exhibition will be "Marilyn Diptych" (1962), from the collection of Tate Modern, London, composed of 50 silkscreen repetitions of Monroe’s publicity still rendered in garish, oversaturated colors or in black-and-white. Joining this signature masterpiece will be the Hirshhorn Museum’s "Marilyn’s Lips" (1962), a massive canvas that isolates Monroe’s evocative lips and reproduces them 162 times, once again in color and black-and-white. Warhol’s repetition of these images is as much an homage to a recently fallen American icon as a reflection of the rapaciousness of both Hollywood and the media in creating, consuming, and discarding its subjects. The exhibition moves from Warhol’s images of then-contemporary celebrities Elizabeth Taylor ("National Velvet," 1963, and Blue Liz as Cleopatra, 1962), Elvis Presley ("Elvis I and II," 1963), Jackie Kennedy ("16 Jackies," 1964), or interestingly even crime figures from the FBI’s Most Wanted list, into an image world defined by the tragic consequences of both random and state-sponsored violence. In Warhol’s monumental monochromatic repetitions of car crashes such as his "Green Disaster #2" (1963), "Orange Car Crash" (1963), or the black-and-white "Saturday Disaster" (1964), the artist appropriates, enlarges, multiplies, and transfers news photographs of terrible car wrecks. Taking on the quality of the memento mori prevalent in Renaissance paintings, Warhol’s car crashes are joined in the exhibition by another group of “disasters” in the form of his series of electric chair paintings and his tuna fish disasters. In a wide range of paintings including "Lavender Disaster" (1963), Warhol repeats a single solemn image of an empty electric chair. Repeated 15 times on a bright lavender canvas, the sobriety of this found image contrasts sharply with its status as the definitive marker of the failure of the social contract. As in so many of these works, Warhol transforms this mute photograph through its multiplication and its translation into garish colors. Unlike his other works from this period, the electric chairs are tragedies waiting to happen and a sign of the banality of death in a culture that defines itself through its portrayal in the mass media. . Because of his oft-quoted statements such as “I want to be a machine,” Warhol was often taken for, at best, a dispassionate and at worst a cynical commentator on his chosen subjects. There is, however, something incredibly human and sympathetic about these images in contrast to the now commonplace and somewhat clichéd interpretation of his paintings as being disengaged from the world. This humanistic aspect of his work becomes clear in Warhol’s picture of Jacqueline Kennedy, "16 Jackies" (1964), which entered the Walker Art Center’s collection in 1968. It is with 16 Jackies that the exhibition comes full circle back to the interplay of celebrity and tragedy that defined Warhol’s images of Marilyn Monroe. His near obsession with press photos of Jackie before and just after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963 resulted in a large body of paintings devoted to these photographs. In these works, the artist at once enshrines Jackie as a tragic widow while at the same time invokes the end of a hope-filled period of youthful exuberance that would come to define the “Camelot” image of Kennedy ‘s presidency. ” While Warhol once suggested that he was not a political artist, stating, “I feel that I represent the United States in my art but I’m not a social critic,” these works have a sensibility in them akin to that of Francisco de Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings illustrating the incredible brutality of the Napoleonic invasion.

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