Word: warhols
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...media gladly helped inflate that image. The '80s were the new '20s, and here was its Capone! And Gotti obsessed over his coverage. TIME put an Andy Warhol portrait of him on its cover in 1986, and Gotti framed it in his office. On one surveillance tape, he and his associates can be heard critiquing a TV re-enactment of the Mob hit that brought him to power. Even that hit was cinematic: his predecessor, Paul Castellano, was gunned down in front of Sparks steak house in crowded midtown Manhattan at Christmastime. All Martin Scorsese would have added were credits...
...pensive gaze of Liz Taylor, Monroe's heavy-lidded glance and the Mona Lisa's enigmatic leer recall the direct eye contact of the Catholic icons of Christ, the Madonna and saints that Warhol grew up with. Catholic imagery is also full of death and grisly executions, subjects that possessed Warhol during the '60s. Darkness hangs over Room 9 (Disasters) as the mushroom cloud of Atomic Bomb (1963) hung over the decade. In images adapted from anonymous news photos, rioters are attacked by police dogs. Women die in car wrecks or from poisoned tuna fish. The broken body...
...Warhol used income from celebrity portraits to fund experiments, including huge abstracts. They consist of scaled-up camouflage material or giant Rorschach blots: patterns intended to confuse the eye or to suggest things that aren't there. Smaller, darker paintings from the same period sprinkled with real diamond dust record shadows falling across his studio...
...morbidity and somberness" creeps into his later work, says De Salvo. Though his paintings preserve the beautiful youth of Mick Jagger and Liza Minelli, in his self-portraits Warhol recorded his own hollow eyes, leathery skin and flagrantly artificial hair. De Salvo sees the preoccupations of someone growing older. She admits, though, that he feared death and was terrified of going back into the hospital, having been seriously injured in 1968 when he was shot by an unbalanced feminist...
...frantic social life among the glitterati continued to the end. But De Salvo wanted to avoid "fetishizing the celebrity persona at the expense of looking at the work," preferring to present him as any other painter. Warhol, Pop Art pioneer, didn't live to see his prediction about fame come horribly true. He died unexpectedly in 1987 following a gall-bladder operation - in a hospital. He claimed his work was all surface and described himself as "deeply superficial." But somehow he raised shallowness to new heights...