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REVIEWS AND PREVIEWS: NEW NAMES THIS MONTH
Andy Warhol
Thomas B. Hess
Andy Warhol [Castelli] is the brightest of Pop artists. Underneath his turtleneck disguises - white wig, black glasses, deprecating shrugs in frugging bashes - you sense a diamond-sharp mind with a flair for doctrinaire theatrics. "I think everybody should be a machine," he wrote [A.N., NOV. '63] and his latest pictures do look as numb, banal and modern as the latest suds-free washer. These are works for the mantlepiece of a T.V.commercial hero - say, the Jolly Green Giant. Warhol's subject matter used to lean on the sadistic and erotic - death and pinups. Now four illustrations (from a Kodak journal) of what seem to be four pansies (The Herald-Tribune called them anemones) have been screened, photo-mechanically enlarged and squeegeed onto batches of stretched canvas. Color the backgrounds bitter grass. Color the petals Op-Pop fluorescent: Crash-helmet orange, Joseph E. Levine gold, Zap-gun ultra-maroon. They are successfully drained of any interest beyond the conceptual apparatus a spectator chooses to poke at them. It is as if Warhol got hung up on the cliché that attacks "modern art" for being like "wallpaper," and decided that wallpaper is a pretty good idea, too. He empties the image of everything except a rudimentary decision for voids. The rest is up to the art-gallery audience - and a livelier bunch of swinging humanoids won't be found this side of Vegas. Most of the works in the show had little gold stars pasted to the wall beneath them - meaning they had been sold - filling the gallery atmosphere with a glamor-smell of cash. The profound anti-style achievement of Warhol's show is that it embodies what's "In." He follows close to the trail of the divine Salvador Dali - of whom Arshile Gorky once said (addressing a group of integrity-soaked cold-water-loft abstractionists): "I profoundly admire Dali, for his immense financial success." In other words, Warhol makes empty metaphysical vessels that are continually being filled with real money, which is an undeniable triumph, sociologically. He faltered only once: in a back room was a rectangle made Of 42 identical closeups of Jacqueline Kennedy, bereft and aghast, screened from the famous news photo where she watches Lyndon Johnson being sworn in. Here Warhol blurts a certain tenderness and respect, in his choice of image, in the ghastly lilac colors. There is sentiment of the Atlantic City souvenir-shop variety perhaps, but would it have occurred to Univac? Warhol had better keep these lapses into 18th-century impulse under control, or he might turn into a human artist.
Art News, January 1965: II
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