Pop Goes The Warhol
Eat before you head to The Brooklyn Museums new Warhol exhibittheres no tomato soup there.
Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, the museums exhibition of Warhols late work, opens June 18, but weve got one burning question: why should we care? With whole museums devoted to him in Pittsburgh and Slovakia, pieces in major art institutions all over the world, and retrospectives at MoMA and the Tate, what does the wigged one have left to offer?
Seventy-five percent of the works in those shows dated to the 1960s, says Joseph D. Ketner II, who curated the show. This is the first American exhibition ever of the last 10 years of his life.
Brooklyn Museum curator Sharon Matt Atkins frames it similarly: Critics return to the pop era. But that lasted only seven years in the 60s. The reality is that Warhol was doing a lot of important things outside of that realm much later.
To put it simply: This exhibit wont be the Warhol were used to seeing on tote bags, T-shirts and album covers. Eschewing the pop aesthetic that made him famous, The Last Decade displays nearly 50 of Warhols paintings between 1978 and his death in 1987, a time Ketner said was likely his most prolific, and certainly most personal and experimental.
They are absolutely massive and monumental pieces and they were by and large not shown during his lifetime, he says, adding that some, such as his Last Supper interpretations encapsulate the artists career.
Here is a look at five unexpected Warhols the museum is showing.
Origin Of Cotton: A collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente displays Warhols inspired spirit and a return to his artistic origins. Basquiat used a brush by hand. And that was a signal moment of figurative painting for Warhol, something he hadnt done since the 50s, Ketner says. Basquiat is the last one to paint on it, but he uses a screen printthey were learning from each other.
Energy: Near the end of his life, Warhol became obsessed with his health. This silk screen on linen was taken from an advertisement for a mind-energy breakthrough drink. He once said money and fame are not important if youre not healthy. These paintings have a lot to do with him trying to understand his alternative medicines and health care, Ketner says. "Energy" utilizes Warhols honed pop method while exploring new subject matter.
The Last Supper (The Big C): Warhol was known by few to be a devout Catholic who obsessed over religious themes. He painted many Last Suppers, but this is said to be one of the finest reinterpretations. It combines all the ideas floating around Warhols head near the time of his death. We have a Catholic boy painting The Last Supper, an artist who is aspiring to be recognized as the greatest of all time, making an homage to one of the greatest paintings of all time, and at the same making a marvelous composition, Ketner explains.
Eggs: Late in life, Warhol was playing with the idea that something representational could become abstract. But with Catholic undertones and a concrete title, paintings like "Eggs" become a gray area of the personally representative. Here hes looking back to Easter cards that he had done as a greeting card artist. There was some division of his religious beliefs with his artistic life, and that becomes evident in paintings like this, Atkins says.
Yarn: This shows a rare side of abstract expressionism in Warhols repertoire. For this large Yarn series, Warhol was commissioned by an Italian yarn company to illustrate a spool. This is what he came up with, eventually becoming obsessed. He loved it and went on to produce 20 or 30 of these yarn paintings with silk screen that look like Jackson Pollocks drip paintings, Ketner says. But with these paintings, Warhol was trying to undo Pollock.