Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Andy Warhol

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Prints from Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol museum reveal one American's less than private obsessions

by Heather Joyner

Just adding an "a" to Andy Warhol's last name does much to clarify the story of one of this past century's most influential artists. Son of Czech immigrant and miner Andrej Warhola, the man we know as Warhol eventually—remarkably—became as famous as his celebrated subjects. Then again, what birthplace might more likely breed ambition than 1928 Pittsburgh, a grimy city straining to crank out steel? In the same vein, what era other than that of the Great Depression has produced more insecurity and lust for the finer things in life? Yet his overwhelming desire for recognition and prosperity only begins to explain the phenomenon that was Warhol. Dark-browed and peculiar with a signature shock of white hair, he changed the course of New York's art world beginning in the '60's, toppling Abstract Expressionism from its lofty perch. Warhol certainly required determination to do so, but he also needed to be obsessed. And obsessed he was.

If you read Jesse Fox Mayshark's Gamut piece about Warhol in the May 24 issue of Metro Pulse, you've already been provided with a wealth of biographical information regarding his years at Carnegie Tech, his subsequent move to Manhattan, and his meteoric rise in the realm of 1950s advertising. More familiar are Warhol's images themselves, whether they feature Campbell's soup cans, shoes, or Marilyn Monroe. Like 'em or not, they are emblematic of our culture and represent Pop Art's greatest coup: blurring the lines between fine and commercial art.

Possibly more interesting than his work are the germs of his ideas—not to mention the controversy Warhol provoked. For instance (says Art Historian Dave Hickey), it was Warhol's teacher Balcomb Greene who inspired his 1964 Brillo box installation when warning students against "the soap box speaking instead of the man." Pat Hackett, co-author of Andy Warhol's POPism, The Warhol '60's, refers to Leo Castelli's associate Ivan Karp and quotes Warhol as saying, "I asked Ivan for ideas...at a certain point he said, 'You know, people want to see you. Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame—they feed the imagination.' That's how I came to do the first Self-Portraits. Another time, [Ivan] said, 'Why don't you paint some cows...they're so wonderfully pastoral and such a durable image in the history of the arts.' I don't know how pastoral he expected me to make them, but when he saw the huge cow heads [two of which can be found in the KMA's current show] he was shocked. But after a moment he exploded with: 'They're super-pastoral! They're ridiculous! They're blazingly bright and vulgar!'"

As for the 50 Warhol prints presently on display, "vulgar" is not the last word that comes to mind. As a self-conscious yet blatant public persona and icon maker, Warhol was not what you'd call subtle. Personally, I find his actual pieces so similar to reprints in books that seeing them "in the flesh" is no revelation, despite a difference in scale or context. Although I recently caught hell for writing that I dislike Renoir's work, I'll venture to say the same of Warhol. I find much of what he produced to be sickly slick, superficial—even tragic (given his exploitation of others' fame in order to advance his own).

I will give Warhol credit for further legitimizing the silk-screen process, for occasionally beating the media at its own game, and for what Hickey calls an "all-out assault upon the elite citadel of American high culture." I also appreciate Warhol's assertion that "despite its aspiration to 'higher things,' an art gallery [is], indeed, a market—if not a supermarket, then at least a meta-market where, through the sublimation of appetite, we concern ourselves with commodities in good taste rather than commodities that taste good." To challenge that relationship between consumerism and connoisseurship takes chutzpah. However, Warhol ultimately leaves me cold. In a sense, that's what he intended.

Warhol said, "You should always have a product that has nothing to do with who you are or what people think about you—so that you never start thinking that your product is you, or your fame or your aura." This subversion of the self naturally leads to an emphasis on technique and appearances. Unlike what Hickey calls Jackson Pollock's "shamanistic ritual dance around the canvas," Warhol's approach was to depersonalize art. He created it—or had others create it—in his "Factory" setting and effectively "domesticated his neo-primitivist dance into cocktail Terpsichore." Or we could simply call him a glorified society portrait painter, among other things. In the mid-'60's, the European press called his work "Capitalist Realism." Whatever our take, he resurrected a Renaissance willingness to acknowledge and support the commercial underpinnings of art—a perspective we still shy away from, perhaps fearing the loss of individualism.

Art Critic Henry Geldzahler has mentioned that when he asked his friend why he wasn't more upset that President John Kennedy had been shot, Warhol talked about seeing people in India "having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died." He went on to say, "It was then I realized that everything was just how you decided to think about it."

The KMA show includes Kennedy images as well as visually striking portraits of Joseph Beuys and Mick Jagger. There are screenprints encrusted with "diamond dust," offset lithographs of flowers, and camouflage pieces suiting everyone from park rangers to strippers to Henri Matisse. Selections from a later "Shadows" series are fresh, and combined, the above reveal the extent to which Warhol believed that art, especially, is whatever you've decided to think it is. Plastic beach baskets containing laminated color copies, cans, and boxes are scattered throughout the gallery and are clever and fun. Considering that Warhol made more than 75 films, a video display or two would be a plus. But there's enough of this groundbreaking artist's work to please Warhol fans and maybe even earn a few converts.