"Andy Warhol began as a commercial
illustrator, and a very successful one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller
in a stylish blotty line that derived from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an
art gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32
Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of Warhol's best work was
done over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it
all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information,
where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and
print, through images that become banal and disassociated by repeated again and
again and again, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot
and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not
that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He
was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity
- the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced
both sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists, like
Monet,
had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations
of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and
how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two
soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with
different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as
product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his
sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have
partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This
affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became
the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz,
Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the condition of
being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image
overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen,
and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the
screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess. What they
suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of
routine error and of entropy..."
- From
"American Visions",
by Robert Hughes
In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art
in New York had a major retrospective of his works.
The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 1994.