Andy Warhol

1 7 8 Y A R T I N R E V I E W R I C H A R D D E M I N G According to a statement cited by The New York Times, Donna de Salvo, chief curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, has made explicit her aim in organizing the new retrospective of the work of the artist Andy Warhol on view until 31 March 2019: ‘‘To humanize Warhol and get people to actually look at what he made is not as easy as it might sound.’’ There is an undeniable irony in that ambition, given that Warhol himself once said in reference to his silk-screen presentations of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, and others, ‘‘The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.’’ Of course, de Salvo has long been one of the most committed of advocates for Warhol and is well acquainted with the ways that the idea of Warhol – nowadays we would call it ‘‘the brand’’ – can supplant the actual work of Warhol. Who better than de Salvo to know, too, how the very structures of the art world so often work directly against the goal of humanizing an artist by continually seeking to commodify art, A n d y W a r h o l : F r o m A t o B a n d B a c k A g a i n (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City 12 November 2018–31 March 2019) 1 7 9 R with Warhol being a figure who, to a large degree, actively leaned into such forces. Nevertheless, set beneath de Salvo’s statement is a fundamental question that I want to bring to the fore: How does one look at a piece by Warhol in order to really see it? The retrospective as de Salvo has organized it is mightily comprehensive , rightfully so in light of Warhol’s cultural significance, and for that reason it can be a bit dizzying. Although exhibitions of aspects of Warhol’s work are frequent, and his images (and influence ) seemingly ubiquitous, this is the first such large-scale, inclusive exhibition since the important Warhol retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, just two years after the artist’s death. More than thirty years have passed since Warhol died of a routine surgery complicated by the lingering internal damage from an assassination attempt by the writer Valerie Solanas in 1968 (and probably further complicated by the artist’s decadeslong use of stimulants and ‘‘diet pills’’), and so the Whitney’s current retrospective has the benefit of historical perspective with regard to Warhol’s corpus and the critical distance that can only occur over time. Given not only the historical scope of the show but also how prolific Warhol was across the vastly di√erent kinds of art and media he would take on – from photographs to films, from prints to paintings, from installations to sketches his reach was wide – the show resists easy summation. It includes the obvious classics: the 1964 Brillo boxes and the Campbell’s soup cans from 1962; the portrait of Edie Sedgwick is to be found, as well as the series of multiple Mona Lisas titled Thirty Are Better Than One. A room is devoted to the Death and Disaster series and its silk-screen depictions of car crashes, electric chairs, suicides, and police brutality pulled from journalistic photographs, transfigured by the artist in bright colors and serial repetition, again and again. If you have seen a Warhol – and who in America hasn’t? – it undoubtedly appears in the show, in some form or other. Certainly this familiarity contributes to the sense that people no longer see the work, if indeed they ever did. The exhibition seeks to change that dynamic by demonstrating how Warhol’s sense of aesthetic possibilities developed over the course of his career. Warhol’s most iconic images sit alongside far less famous images drawn from earlier in his life. Somewhat...