Art

Marilyn Monroe repeated 50 times, 200

Campbell’s soup cans, a canvas filled edge
to edge with effigies of Liz, Jackie, dollar
bills or Elvis. Absurd though these pictures
looked at first, Warhol’s fixation on repeti-
tion and glut emerged as the most powerful
statement ever made by an American artist
on the subject of a consumer economy. The
cranking out of designed objects of desire
was so faithfully mirrored in Warhol’s
images and so approvingly mimicked in his
sense of culture that no one, in fact, could
be sure what he thought.
He was also, from the outset, much poss-
essed by death. Warhol’s multiple-image
disasters of the early ’60s based on news
photos of fatal car wrecks are suffused with
dread and compassion beneath their icily
casual surface. Such works looked amaz-
ingly raw, frank and direct when they were
made. More than 20 years later, they still do.

T hen in 1968, one of Warhol’s hangers-

on—a crazed actress named Valeria
Solanis—shot and wounded him with a .32.
Neither his health nor his talent would fully
A Caterer of Repetition and Glut recover. There had been one Warhol before
the shooting; another would emerge after it.
Andy warhol: 1928-1987 The former had been the onlooker, both
fascinated and wounded by media culture

T he tabloids gave Andy Warhol a Viking

funeral last week, as well they might. At
58 he suffered cardiac arrest following
and its power to dictate desire and nostalgia.
You could not look at early Warhol (Marilyn-
as-virgin, in full drag-queeny apotheosis on
gall-bladder surgery. To the end, he rem- a gold ground; Golgotha, envisioned in
ained surrounded by an aura of popular fame repeated views of an execution chamber
such as no other American artist had ever with its electric chair and its sign enjoining
known in his or her lifetime—a flash-card SILENCE ) without sensing that the pressure
recognizability that almost rivaled Picasso’s. behind such images of abased sanctity came
Millions of Americans who could not have from a Byzantine Catholic boyhood.
picked Jasper Johns or Henri Matisse from But this intensity began to leak out of his
a police lineup could identify that pale, work after the shooting, and by the end of
squarish, loose-lipped face with its acne, the ’70s it was gone. His energy last flickered
blinking gaze and silvery wig. in the hieratic images of Mao Tse-tung (1973)
He was, after all, that weird guy who did and perhaps in the 1976 paintings of ham-
those soup cans a quarter of a century (was mers and sickles. The rest was mostly social
it really that long?) ago. The working-class portraiture, liquor endorsements and bathetic
hero, son of an immigrant Czech coal miner collaborations with junior burnouts like Jean-
named Warhola in Pittsburgh, who for a time Michel Basquiat, along with one single-
acquired a court that seemed almost Habs- theme edition of prints after another. But
burgian in scope if not in distinction: the even in decline, Warhol remained indicative.
Velazquez dwarfs of the Factory. The guy in In a sense, Warhol was to the art world
the photo with Madonna, Liza, Jackie O. The what his buddy of the discos, Roy Cohn,
aesthete who said money was the most was to law. Just as Cohn degraded the image
important thing in his life and in the future Warhol: cranking out cultural artifacts of the legal profession while leaving no
everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, doubt about his own forensic brilliance, so
thus offering a tacky sort of transcendence genius and then lapsed back into a barely Warhol released toxins of careerism,
to every hair stylist, fledgling actor and art disguised form of commercial art. His sense facetiousness and celebrity worship into the
student in America. The ageless child of of timing, his grip on how to give an image stream of American culture. He was the last
media fame who made scores of under- graphic clout, and his fixation on style as an artist whose cynicism could still perplex the
ground films in which often nothing end in itself all came out of his years of art world, which may explain why—even
happened (Empire offered eight hours of advertising and display work during the ’50s after he said that art was just another job—
staring at the Empire State Building) and for I. Miller, Lord & Taylor, Glamour and people continued to scan his latest efforts
who published his own magazine, Interview. Vogue. By the end of this period he was rich, for signs of “subversive” credentials. In fact,
Andy, the living transparency, with his face professionally famous and yearning for his work was no more subversive than a
pressed to the shop window of the American recognition as a serious artist. catering service, and as such it fit the age of
dream and his head full of schemes to titill- The opportunity came with the Pop Reagan nicely. But the Warhol who will
ate an aging, youth-obsessed American culture. movement in the early ’60s. His contribution survive, the artist of authentic inspiration,
Warhol’s early works were the ones that was the image taken from advertising or died when he was shot 19 years ago, not last
mattered. He began as a commercial artist, tabloid journalism: grainy, immediate, a slice week. And that artist, in his tragic concision
became for a time (between about 1962 and of unexplained life half-registered over and and awful openness, will haunt us for some
1968) a fine artist with something akin to over, full of slippages and visual stutters. time yet. — By Robert Hughes
90 TIME, MARCH 9, 1987