The Andy Warhol Exhibits in D.C. Make Their Own “Headlines”
WASHINGTON D.C.—“Warhol Bombs!” “Warhol Sensational!”
Depending on your point of view, either headline might serve as an accurate report on the two new Andy Warhol exhibitions on the National Mall. In one, the National Gallery of Art breaks fresh ground by looking at 80 works in which Warhol, a founder of Pop art, replicated in drawings and prints the front pages of tabloids with their bold headlines.
Across the Mall, the Hirshhorn Museum (the Smithsonian’s contemporary art unit) arrays Warhol’s 450-foot “painting” titled “Shadows.” It is made up of 102 multi-colored panels, each a large-sized canvas that Warhol painted and silk-screened. On the Hirshhorn’s curved white wall, the canvases are lined up edge-to-edge, each one showing the same geometrical image that came from a shadow that Warhol had photographed. A Pop art rainbow comes to mind.
The Warhol exhibit season in D.C., which runs through January, also features lectures and films. Much of that fare will be offered by people who were part of Warhol’s Factory, a studio-and-art-party scene he established in Manhattan. As the “Headlines” exhibit reminds us, Warhol died young. On Feb. 23, 1987 the New York Post tabloid blared: “Andy Warhol Dead at 58.” He was the “prince of pop art,” the Post said. He died during a routine hospital operation.
Warhol first started to copy out newspaper fronts as pencil doodles in 1956. By the next decade he was taking photos of newspapers. Then, with a light projector, he traced out the photo images on paper or canvas and filled them in with pencil and paint. The result was rather unpolished. He eventually turned entirely to using photographic stencils on silkscreens, enabling him to mass produce high quality images of news pages. On small size canvases, Warhol nearly set out to silkscreen every page of the Oct. 24, 1983 issue of the New York Post. He also did newspaper fronts on canvases the size of an entire wall.
Warhol’s “favorite subjects” were celebrity, death, and destruction, the exhibit explains. He did newspapers because they “represented another consumer product.” After all, consumer products—such as Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans—were Warhol’s signature style in the art market. It was tedious work, but by keeping up a production line of silkscreen prints, Warhol became the unrivaled icon of contemporary art. His partisans will argue—as does the “Headlines” exhibition—that Warhol’s mechanical replication of mundane images “radically shifted the boundaries between vernacular and fine art.”
He also broke the speed record for art production. His works were printed rather swiftly, using a warehouse-floor production line, though each piece had a bit of variation. The 102 virtually identical canvases lined up in the “Shadows” exhibit are a case in point. Today, there are so many Warhol works that curators and lawyers often must rule on which are “original.” An original Warhol—whatever that may mean—can fetch hundreds of thousand of dollars on the art market.
The Warhol “Headlines” exhibition opened during the same weeks in which we heard of the death of another cultural icon, Steve Jobs. As the Oct. 6 New York Post bannered: “Steve Jobs Dead.” It may be hard to imagine two greater cultural icons than Warhol and Jobs. Each gave our modern-day visual culture a salient feature. Warhol turned ads, products, celebrity photos, and headlines into large, simple, colorful artworks. Think T-shirts and posters. Jobs framed our world in a new kind of widow: computer screens with icons and animation.
Most of all, however, Warhol and Jobs were not shy about being masters of mass marketing. Warhol had no qualms about saying that “art” can indeed print money, and the more the merrier. Jobs built innovative corporations that made no bones about cornering markets.
In today's world, culture is changed not by highly refined artworks, but by images and objects that lend to large-scale output. It may not seem fair: Warhol mass-produced scores of five-minutes-to-make silkscreen prints. Jobs punched out millions of iPods on Chinese factory lines. Fair or not, these are what have shaped contemporary American culture. In short, Warhol and Jobs are mass media friendly.
The big difference, however, is that Warhol operated inside the art world. He mass produced things, but as “art,” each one retained a special status, what art historians have called the “aura.” Owning an aura-laden Warhol print is beyond the means of ordinary people. Some of these run into the millions of dollars at art auctions. The price of Apple computers and mobile devices start out high, but eventually come within the reach of just about everybody who wants one.
Thirty years after Warhol’s death, we continue to celebrate him in the form of major retrospective exhibits. What about Steve Jobs thirty years hence? One day there may be an Apple Museum or a Jobs Foundation. However, in 2041 will Jobs be celebrated on the scale that we still celebrate Warhol? That seems unlikely.
The world of contemporary art is unique. It thrives on celebrating its icons on a regular basis. The Warhol show travels next year to Frankfurt, Rome, and his own hometown museum in Pittsburgh. Andy Warhol will always give contemporary art a fresh set of headlines.
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