NO KIDDING: In Warhol's Jackie, we witness her transformation from sunny, smiling first lady to
shattered widow. |
“Andy Warhol: Pop Politics” | Currier Museum Of Art, 150 Ash St, Manchester, New Hampshire | Through January 4
“Invisible Rays: The Surrealist Legacy” | “Project For A New American Century” | Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South St, Waltham | Through December 14 |
For a while now I've been mulling over a question: was Andy Warhol more politically engaged than he's given credit for? My thought begins with his 1963 Race Riot screenprints based on Life photos of police siccing German shepherds on civil-rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. The subject of civil rights rarely appears in books documenting '60s art. Could Warhol's taking it on be significant?"It just caught my eye," he said of Race Riots in 1966. Two years later, he added, "I feel I represent the US in my art, but I'm not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best."
Of course, Warhol was notoriously and deliberately flaky in interviews, so we write off much that he said and look for clues in his work. The consensus verdict: his art is about media, celebrity, and the nature of art. The corollary: he focused on electric chairs, atomic mushroom clouds, Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and Communist hammers and sickles because they were in the news at the time — he was just channeling the zeitgeist. But could he have been engaged in the political substance of his images?
Of all those works, the Currier Museum of Art's "Andy Warhol: Pop Politics" has only Mao. On the other hand, you'll see Warhol's most outright political statement: a 1972 poster of a green-faced Richard Nixon above the slogan "Vote McGovern" that he made to raise money for the McGovern campaign. Later he backed off, claiming, "The idea was that you could vote either way." He didn't want to offend potential clients — and the portrait business is the show's focus, not politics. I still recommend "Pop Politics" for what it is: a fizzy survey of Warhol's effort to become a modern-day court painter.
It opens with Jackie (circa 1964), six screenprints based on news photos of Jackie Kennedy, from her arrival in Dallas with her husband to her mourning after JFK was shot dead there. It's the most emotionally moving work Warhol ever did. We witness Jackie's wrenching transformation from sunny smiling first lady to shattered widow. Warhol emphasizes this by cropping the grainy photos down to just her head and shoulders. The photos, emerging from mourning veils of blue or silver, seem to flicker next to one another, like flashes from TV or memory. We empathize with this woman, the depth of whose mourning we can't fathom, but whose grief represents our own, and the nation's.
Warhol returns to JFK's assassination five years later with Flash — November 22, 1963, a portfolio of 11 technicolor prints of a smiling (black on black) JFK, the president and his wife in the motorcade, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Texas School Book Depository, from where Oswald is deemed to have fired the fatal shots.
Warhol's work on the portfolio appears to have been interrupted when he was shot in his studio in 1968. Most of the work here postdates that attack. Afterward, he backed away from his wild and crazy days; he spent the '70s courting the rich, famous, and powerful for portrait commissions. Saying that " 'business' was the best art," he came to average 50 to 100 commissions a year; the portraits here include Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and the shah of Iran. There are vitrines with letters from Nixon (inviting Warhol's recommendations) and Robert Kennedy (thanking him for work on an art committee).
Warhol's '60s work tended to be black-and-white photos reproduced atop a single color or, as in Marilyn, a black-and-white photo gaudily colorized. In the '70s, he went more Marilyn, more Baroque, laying traced drawings, floating color swatches, and dumb-ass faux Expressionist brushwork atop and under screenprinted photos. A lot of this stuff feels slight and shallow — partly on purpose, I suspect, and partly as a result of mass production.
On his own, Warhol painted Golda Meir, Vladimir Lenin, Ronald Reagan, and Mao. The 1972 portraits of the Chinese leader — exhibited here atop Warhol's matching Mao wallpaper — were Warhol's monumental work of the '70s. They get me wondering again about his political engagement.
Warhol noted the correspondences between his own repeated portraits and the ubiquitous Mao portraits around China, which sat at the confluence of politics, propaganda, and celebrity. His suite of 10 Mao screenprints on paper, with varying hot and cool color combos, is sharp. On the one hand, his riffs seem a send-up of the omnipresent Mao. On the other, his repetition drains all emotion out of Mao's expression on the way to (perhaps) plumbing a deep political truth about the dictator's image. In the end it seems to be about a surveillance state — wherever we turn, Mao is watching us.
