Andy Warhol: Cowboys and Indians & Billy Schenck: Myth of the West
San Antonio, TX
Adouble dose of Pop Art—two exhibitions, two artists, two unique pop-centric views of the West—is now on view at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.
The concurrent exhibitions are Andy Warhol: Cowboys and Indians and Billy Schenck: Myth of the West. Though they are separate exhibits, they will be presented to museum’s guests as a unique pairing that should be considered jointly. “They are very complementary. Guests will come into the gallery and see two title walls side by side next to each other. On the left will be the Andy Warhol works, and on the right Billy Schenck,” says Briscoe president and CEO Michael Duchemin. “We linked them together to show Warhol, one of the progenitors of American Pop Art, with Schenck, who took inspiration from Warhol and applied it to his own art to create Western Pop Art in the 1960s and 1970s.”
The Warhol exhibit focuses solely on one of the iconic artist’s last portfolios, 1986’s Cowboys and Indians, which consists of 10 screenprints with Western themes, including stylized, neontinted portraits of John Wayne, Annie Oakley, Geronimo, Buffalo Bill and a number of Native American objects, including a Crow war shield, Hopi katsina dolls and a Buffalo Head nickel. Warhol was essentially commissioned to create the pieces, with each of the 10 works consisting of 250 prints. The exhibition will also show four trial proofs that were included in a smaller run.
At the time, Warhol—whose works featuring Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans had previously electrified the world with their audacious simplicity and stylization—was tapping into a growing sense of nostalgia about the West and the American cowboy. “It was well into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and Reagan, because he came from Hollywood, represented the resurgence of the American cowboy hero. That was followed by Urban Cowboy and other things,” Duchemin says. “The American cowboy hero had been beaten up a little by that point. The Vietnam War, Watergate and the Sergio Leone anti-hero movies…after all that the cowboy was ready for
a heroic comeback.”
Schenck came along at the right time and place to meet Warhol and later experience this same Western revival that would lead to Cowboys and Indians. In 1965 an 18-year-old Schenck visited New York City and bounced around the galleries and museums. In one gallery he saw Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup can images and was hooked on Pop Art immediately. Four or five months later the young artist had worked his way into Warhol’s circle as a stagehand for Velvet Underground and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a series of high-art concerts designed by Warhol. “Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, Nico…they were all there and I was crashing at their place and then setting up the equipment for the shows, strobe lights, movie clips behind the band… conceptually it was unprecedented.”
Later, as Schenck would start creating his own work—caption paintings, caption photography, halftone dot paintings and artwork created from old Hollywood movie stills, much of it inspired by Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—warhol would drop in on at least one of his early shows. “I was deadly aware about doing caption and dot paintings in 1980. [Warhol and Lichtenstein] were still alive and casting a long shadow over my work,” Schenck says. “I didn’t want to appear to have derivative work, but I wanted to interact with their concepts within my own Western art and apply it to the Western genre.”
Warhol died in 1987 and Lichtenstein a decade later, but American Pop Art continues to thrive with Schenck, who is a fixture at many Western museums and events, where his work is shown alongside paintings by Logan Maxwell Hagege, Kim Wiggins, Dennis Ziemienski and other artists who have benefited greatly from the path Schenck has carved from contemporary art to Western art. “I just love expanding the definition of the Western universe. I find it easy to do because there’s always been a void there. I can apply Western imagery to all sorts of scenarios and put it into a contemporary, viable and relevant context,” he says. “Warhol and Lichtenstein invented Pop Art and I took it on its natural trajectory but in the Western genre.”
Both exhibitions continue through September 3.