Nearly every artist represented in the collection at MoMA suffered the scorn of his or her contemporaries, let alone their colleagues and the already established art community and whatever norms had settled from the dust of the previous artistic revolution. But perhaps none more so than Andy Warhol. Warhol continues to be one of the most polarizing figures in the landscape of art history and criticism, an artist, in fact, who created a great schism at the very institution we are talking about in these posts after a 1962 exhibition at MoMA catapulted him to the apex or nadir, depending upon your perspective, of the discussion of what, exactly, is art.
Warhol was a first-generation American, the son of Lemko immigrants from present-day Slovakia. His father worked in the coal mines of southwest Pennsylvania and the growing family moved a few times in and around the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. As a young boy, Warhol was stricken with what is believed today to have been scarlet fever, leaving him weak, blotchy, bedridden months on end, outcast by peers, and ultimately, a rather neurotic hypochondriac. He found salvation in art and after toying with the idea of attending Pitt, then teaching, he settled instead on the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today's Carnegie Mellon) to become an artist in his own right.
What is often overlooked in the bright burning spotlight that was his life and career, the swirl that surrounded all of it, Warhol was a supremely gifted artist. An excellent draftsman and illustrator, his line could be brilliantly executed. Second, and more important for me, his use of color was beyond even that of the Fauvists. He pushed that envelope to new emotional heights and were I to ask you, I can almost guarantee you could summon up the red of his Campbell soup can in your mind's eye. It is not the red Campbell's uses, by the way, it is Warhol's slightly altered version and to maximum effect.
Through his painting, his silk-screening, his films, his sculptural installations, his writing, Warhol did much to succeed in an effort attempted by many of his predecessors: Compose an all-encompassing artistic aesthetic that touched every part of the human experience.
Why so controversial, then? Well, first, I think because his silk-screening techniques allowed him to mass produce his work, something other artists and collectors likely feared as the market place shifted between what is good art and what is simply valuable because of its rarity. It was a good, well-timed, and much-needed thumb to the nose, if you ask me.
Secondly, with further-reaching implications, the mirror he held up to us was not entirely flattering. In an ever-increasing consumer culture, we are attracted to the popular, to the manipulated, to the ordinary dressed up in emperor's clothes. Why is a box of Brillo pads art? Because by re-contextualizing it, we examine what draws us to it in the first place. This is at least part of what is at the core of popular art, or Pop Art as it became to be known. That is why it is good art.
But if we use the construct that good art reflects the human condition, whereas great art predicts the human condition, why might Warhol be great?
Because he predicts the Kardashians, he predicts the internet, or mass communication at least, he predicts the downfall of celebrity, the loss of its cache, in an age when anyone can become famous simply for being famous, recognizable for nothing but exposure, and with fame accessible to absolutely everyone, the value of it bottoms out. He lived in a time when celebrity meant everything. He predicts our decade when it is utterly meaningless.
I also would like to mention for a moment his often forgotten good heart. He went on to mentor hundreds of artists and the world might never have known the genius of Jean-Michel Basquiat alone, for example, were it not for his eagle eye and generosity, spiritually and financially.
The painting I chose today, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, underscores some of these premises, and another emerging theory of mine, to boot.
Of the three women Warhol returned to repeatedly, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, I think two were in on the joke and one never thought any of it funny to begin with. Monroe and Taylor sought fame, but the fame they enjoyed (or didn't) was the crapshoot of genetics, their beauty was their slingshot. They understood that. And could be self-deprecating and remarkably humble and prescient as their stars rose. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' beauty was part of her equation, but it was the worst day of her life and one of the worst in the world that cemented her celebrity status.
Here we have Marilyn Monroe, painted days after her suicide. Alone is a sea of gold. And my emerging theory plays out before us: That great artists have an innate or deeply cultivated sense of their moment in history which sets them apart uniquely able to change the course of theirs and in their wake, ours as well.
This is more than a nod to the iconoclastic paintings of Orthodox Byzantium after the great schisms where the Kingdom of God was not representational but beyond the representational, where gold stood in for the perfection of the next world. Warhol's Byzantine Catholic upbringing is referenced here, as is the sweep of five centuries of subsequent artistic achievement. It is from this fully realized moment in time he paints. As such, we are invited to worship, as we had Marilyn in life, so much so that I can refer to her as we all do by her first name, a familiarity that is assumed we must remember. But she is set small, an insinuation she is not worthy of worship as much as she is of understanding, lost as she is among the vast universe of this canvas she inhabits barely. And she is 'painted Marilyn,' almost clown-like, Warhol's garish use of color a reminder that this was the painted face Marilyn applied as mask, a persona created perfectly for our mass consumption, successful in its execution, but resembling nearly nothing underneath.
She got the joke until she didn't, the weight of the illusion snapped the tether connecting her to humanity, and the joke, sadly, intensely sadly, turned deadly in her case.
This painting is a cautionary note to the world, I think. And one maybe even lost on its creator. Warhol would go on to become a caricature of himself, lost to the allure of the popping flashbulbs of the paparazzi, wasting time in the night clubs of New York where his sense of authenticity and authentic human connection may have been bruised and broken, his art dimmed and diminished, his trust shattered as much as his body was by the bullets of a 'friend' who nearly assassinated him in 1968, an event from which this hypochondriac never fully recovered, physically, mentally, or spiritually. Fame is a powerful and addictive lie and a fatal one at that. Warhol understood that for us. Until he didn't.
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