You know less about Andy Warhol than you think
Pop artist’s first big retrospective in decades comes to Art Institute
It would not be wrong to begin your visit to the big new Andy Warhol exhibition in the place where the licensed Andy merch is sold: Enter through the gift shop, as it were.
At the one in the Art Institute now, you can buy Warhol-imprinted skateboard decks and socks, colorful scarves bearing the artist’s eternally pallid face, little Brillo boxes that contain wooden blocks or air, and a $500 chess set in which all of the pieces are Campbell’s soup can replicas of exactly the same size, differentiated only by titles printed on top.
A tote bag bears a Warhol aphorism (“art is what you can get away with”), and the T-shirts show his pointedly garish pop-art hibiscuses or the manufactured cool of his first self-portrait painting, a not-handsome fellow done up in sunglasses and arch poses to resemble one.
Warhol was about manufacturing identities, whether for himself (as an artist) or for common commercial products (as art). And, even more, he was about removing the border walls separating art from commerce, one key element of the multifaceted prescience that gets him labeled the most important American artist since 1950. We are living the future in which everyone is famous for 15 minutes, and few artists are as famous as the one who announced such a world was coming.
The tchotchkes, however, although quintessentially Warholian, are the potatoes. The meat is through the museum and upstairs, where some 400 Warhol works dazzle, perplex, surprise and vex — some for the first time, some all over again — in “Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again,” up at the Michigan Avenue museum through Jan. 26.
They include samples of the best known stuff, cool-hot takes on Marilyn and Elvis and the soup and soda they might have plucked from midcentury supermarket shelves, plus the dollar bills that could pay for them.
“This is the first exhibition organized by a U.S. institution in 30 years. But it’s also actually the most comprehensive exhibition that’s ever been organized of the work of Warhol,” says Ann Goldstein, the Art Institute deputy director, who curated the show’s installation in Chicago. “This is an opportunity to dive deeply into one of the most extraordinary artists of our time, whose work still resonates, is still relevant and is still thought provoking so many years after its production.”
But beyond the paintings that climbed the pop charts, the exhibition also includes a charming self-portrait from 1948, done before Warhol left Pittsburgh for New York, and, as a possible bookend to that innocent, hopeful line drawing, the “Oxidation Painting” diptych, made in New York City in 1978 by the worldfamous Andy Warhol.
The latter work’s paired abstract images were manufactured by having people urinate on canvases covered in metallic paint, a gesture at once jaded (about artmaking), parodic (of Jackson Pollock heroically dripping paint across his canvases) and anticipatory (of a coming decade when bodily fluids, for Warhol and other gay men, would become menacing).
The triumph of this first major Warhol retrospective since the almost immediately posthumous “A Retrospective” came here in 1989 is that it takes everything you know or think you know about Warhol and adds to it.
Think Warhol was just a copyist with a canny eye for color and subject matter? The early galleries, focused on the work that won him comfort and renown as a commercial illustrator, plus private, often homoerotic drawings, demonstrate a gifted draftsman at work. His intimate school assignment painting of the family living room, from 1948, has some of the same throbbing biographical poignancy as the Van Gogh bedroom elsewhere in the museum. And then the great, grand silkscreened pop-art images, seen closely and in this context, show the imperfections and additions that help reproduction become art.
“Warhol was exceptional in how he put a lens to contemporary society and American culture,” says Goldstein. “His early pop work focuses on common commodities: Brillo boxes, soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, a dollar bill. These are ordinary subjects that he’s elevated to art, but also he’s used a process of painting that is quite extraordinary as well.”
He stenciled, and he silkscreened, techniques common in the advertising trade. And even bringing commercial imagery into art — what we now call appropriation — was a radical act in an era of Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning, says Goldstein: “Warhol emerged at a time of abstract expressionism, of a kind of bravado, of overheated virtuosity. His kind of cool look at American culture was really counter to that, and yet also is the incredible lens to a reality.”
Think Warhol petered out after the sweeping flourish of his early 1960s work? The final galleries show him grappling with AIDS, obliquely, and the Cold War, collaborating with Jean-Michel Basquiat, moving into abstraction in grand, end-of-career canvases like the “Camouflage Last Supper,” a massive, brooding take on Leonardo’s masterpiece covered in a camouflage pattern. They make the case that he was exploring new vistas, a still-vital artist when routine gallbladder surgery went wrong and killed him in February 1987 at age 58.
Writes the artist Barbara Kruger in the show catalog, “Warhol crammed his images with the commodities and commotions of his time, and made them belt out a national anthem which sounded suspiciously like ‘Money Changes Everything.’ ”
Think Warhol was kind of a detached, frosty-cold fame chaser who was better at chronicling people engaged with life than becoming one himself? Well, yeah, maybe. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it,” he told a downtown newspaper in 1966. Certainly the show is, in the manner of most significant art museum retrospectives, light on the overt biography in favor of showing more of the work.
But a fuller sense of him does seep through, especially early on. There, you see Warhol outside the window, looking in: the wigwearing Rust Belt son of Slovakian immigrants who dropped the slavic “a” from his original last name, Warhola, and, once he made a little money, got a nose job. Flyers for early gallery shows demonstrate his desire to move beyond making art for commission, like in his well-regarded work for the I. Miller shoe stores or the drawing of a young man shooting up that he did for a CBS heroin documentary’s publicity efforts.
Once established, though, Warhol the person kind of disappears, the range of self-portraits on display notwithstanding, in favor of the crafted image of Warhol the impresario. He’s a background figure in some of the many hours of film documenting life at “The Factory,” his art studio/downtown hangout. David Bowie shows up in 1971, just ahead of his own mega-celebrity, and Warhol barely seems interested, at least in the excerpt on offer. The artist is a frequent interviewer on the mid-1980s MTV series “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes,” but he is an interviewer with detached human affect.
Almost amazingly for a man so interested in tabloid headlines and the trans-societal violence that he immortalized in paintings he called his “Death and Disasters” series, Warhol’s own brush with tabloid infamy, death and disaster does not seem to prompt an obvious artistic response.
“Actress Shoots Andy Warhol,” says the screaming headline atop the June 4, 1968, New York Daily News on display. Valerie Solanas, who had a minor part in one of the Factory’s experimental films, showed up there and almost killed Warhol. During his long recuperation, the artist seems to have retreated from work. But when he emerged back into the art world, it wasn’t with anything introspective and autobiographical — or, indeed, exploitative of his own tragedy — but with the series depicting the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Monumental work and a clever subject choice, to be sure, but also a deflection.
For people who like more humanity, more life story, in their retrospectives (removing my fingers from the keyboard here to raise my own hand), you get a few extra dollops of it in the helpful audio guide. You can listen to it from your phone on the Art Institute app or, indeed, you can pregame for the exhibition by listening to the 30-ish minutes of material on the way downtown.
“From A to B and Back Again,” named after a Warhol philosophy book, was curated by Donna De Salvo of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it debuted last November, to rave reviews. Earlier this year, it was at San Francisco MOMA. Its final stop is the Art Institute, which contributes several major pieces, including its glorious, mammoth “Mao,” cleverly on view through a window from the moment you step into the Regenstein Hall entryway, and from other galleries in the show as well.
That entry hall is decorated with Warhol’s purple, black and yellow Cow Wallpaper, originally fabricated for a 1966 gallery show. Atop that bold statement, Goldstein had Warhol’s square celebrity portraits installed as a kind of frieze along the tops of the hall’s walls.
These were works that merged Warhol’s interest in celebrity — he started Interview magazine, after all, with its stars-interviewing-stars format — with his business acumen. For $25,000, people could become the subject and owner of their very own Warhol, as he shot Polaroids of his subjects then transferred them to canvas and dressed their faces up in colors with occasional other artistic fillips.
It’s a who’s who, of sorts, of 1970s society, everyone from artists and art collectors to movie stars, from tennis star Chris Evert to the Shah of Iran to rockers Mick Jagger and Debbie Harry (who still owns her portrait). You might have seen any of these folks at Studio 54 in its heyday, along with Warhol. And you might look at them now and think, How is this not a precursor to Instagram?
“The commission portraits of stars and sports figures and people who wanted to be famous by having their portraits made show his amazing capacity to tap into a psyche of desire for celebrity that is seeded in all of us,” Goldstein says.
The exhibition contains so much, even down to a sample of the studio detritus he boxed up and turned into art: Andy’s phone messages alongside a Lou Reed album alongside a gallery show invitation. Yet what it really does, if it works on you the way it ought to, is lead you into a massive rabbit hole of Warholia, of which the show is only one well-decorated warren.
Start scratching at Warhol’s place in America and you find books, images, even fun facts such as: He probably didn’t say his best-known quote about everyone being famous for 15 minutes, at least not in exactly that way. But one of his great lessons is that we are all happy to attribute it to him, to let him appropriate it and make it one more part of a cultureshaping, culture-reflecting, culture-predicting, boldly original and unabashedly derivative body of work.