Word: warholism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...canvas from 1962 to 1971, hived off from a larger, more systematic show that Critic John Coplans organized for the Pasadena Art Museum last year and has since been touring Europe to near-hysterical acclaim. The Whitney show starts with a series of the soup cans that propelled Warhol into notoriety. But earlier sequences are not present, which is unfortunate, since it denies viewers the chance to follow Warhol's extraordinary range in his exploration of impersonality, and one gets little sense of the roots of his style. For instance, the Do It Yourself pastiches of painting-by-number...
Instead, at Warhol's own insistence, the towering walls of the main gallery are hung, floor to ceiling, with Warhol's fuchsia cow wallpaper, in whose garish and assertive surface the paintings all but drown. A gesture of contempt for his past work? Not quite. This is Warhol's aesthetic of noninvolvement and repetition shoved to another extreme, to the suggestion that a hierarchy of images with a particular "masterpiece" perched on top makes no sense to him. The gross mooing of those cows in the Whitney china shop may also remind viewers of how insulated...
Disappearing Act. Warhol's historical importance is beyond question, if such things are measured by a man's effect on other artists. The use of multiple and serial images, of mechanical reproduction, of systematic banality seen as an absolute-most of this either originates in Warhol's paintings or passes through them en route from Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. But to a wider public, which still measures art in terms of sensuous enjoyability and a man's claim to be an artist by the vim with which he "expresses himself," Warhol is a baffling creature...
...look at an image like Campbell's Soup Can, 1965, is not to see it through Warhol's eyes-he has eliminated all idiosyncrasies. There is no contagion of personality. What remains is the flat, mute face of an actuality presented as meaning nothing beyond itself. When Warhol's series of cans, dollar bills, stickers and movie stars appeared in the early and middle '60s, they were thought ironic, an indictment of consumer culture; and a Goyaesque mordancy was attributed to his silk-screen portraits. Because it was deemed improper for an artist...
...same time, Warhol's sense of the ripeness of a moment is exquisite: since he lives in media and feeds off publicity, it has to be. (He has, in fact, been upstaged only once, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated just two days after Valerie Solanas shot Warhol.) His activity as painter went on over a decade when American society was expending vast energies in self-scrutiny. In 1950, a photo of a dead duck on a beach was a marine still life; by 1970, the same photo was a reference to ecological ruin...