Fifty years ago Andy
Warhol won the art world sweepstakes with his paintings of Campbell's soup
cans. A Los Angeles show of 32 of them - one per flavor - made him famous about
as fast as you could heat up a can on the stove. // The cans nearly filled the
canvases, and have been interpreted as a type of portrait. It was a worthy
subject. The cans were like kings that ruled in a new age of pumped-up commerce
and mass-produced everything.
Likewise, the people
portraits he had just started making trumpeted a new era of mass-reproduced
celebrities. Movie stars and entertainers, like the cans, were populist and
popular, and were perfect for the aptly named Pop Art direction Warhol helped
define.
On the morning after his
show closed, in early August 1962, Marilyn Monroe died.
Warhol wanted to
memorialize the blond bombshell. He trolled Manhattan for a film still, found
one from her 1953 movie "Niagara," and cropped it close around her
head.
He had used paint to make
the soup cans look machine-made. For those first Marilyns, he utilized a new
approach he was pioneering: he combined painting with silkscreen, an industrial
printing process. He created those Marilyn images on the same size canvas
(20-by-16-inches) as his soup can pictures.
One portrait led to
another and another. He portrayed well-known actors, writers and fashion
designers, as well as the artsy, drugged-out, underground denizens of his
studio, which he called The Factory.
A summer show of Warhol's
portraits at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art gives locals and
resort-strip tourists a chance to experience the full range of that most
important - and until recent years, underappreciated - aspect of the Pop
artist's work.
The exhibition, which ends
Aug. 19, includes more than 130 images and was put together by The Andy Warhol
Museum in Pittsburgh, which has been innovative and thoughtful in creating
shows that continue to fold Warhol into a larger world.
Besides portraits from
throughout his career, the show includes photos of Warhol, photobooth pictures,
his film "Eat" (artist Robert Indiana munching on a mushroom) and
several of his mid-1960s "Screen Tests," which were brief portraits
on film of friends and famous people.
The Warhol Museum set up
the show to be chronological, so visitors could discern how his work evolved
through time.
Heather Hakimzadeh,
associate curator of MOCA, rearranged the show into themes. While the clarity
of chronology is somewhat lost, visitors who may know little of Warhol can
learn about the childhood illness that triggered his movie-star fixation, his
schooling at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) and his concept of
celebrity.
Other themes include
movers and shakers (Vice President Nelson Rockefeller), his inner circle
(writer Bob Colacello) and idols (skater Dorothy Hamill).
Warhol is as famous as he
is misunderstood. One popular misconception is that he couldn't paint or draw,
so he had his Factory workers to do it for him.
In fact, Warhol was a
well-known New York advertising artist before going after a fine arts career.
Early drawings from both camps reveal his fluid, lyrical line in describing
figures, faces or shoes in an economic fashion.
Early on, he repeated the
celebrity portrait in irregular ways on a canvas, sometimes resembling a
flickering film strip. His 1960s portraits also could suggest a page from a
newspaper, as with the images of Jackie Kennedy on view from just before and
after her husband's assassination.
The classic portraits from
the '70s settled on the tightly cropped head, using a Polaroid image that
Warhol felt evoked that certain something he saw in the subject.
Weird as Warhol was, he
could do no wrong for an entire decade. He became a symbol of the Sixties.
In the 1970s trends
shifted and his fame chilled.
Twenty-five years after
his death - in February 1987 - Warhol's stock is back up. Part of that is due
to the worthy efforts of the Warhol Museum, and shows such as this one.
Another reason: Portraits
are deemed OK again. In fact, if there's any direction in today's art world,
it's that same anything-goes attitude Warhol fostered back in the day.
An accompanying show
called "I Like Soup" features a few dozen mostly well-known artists
associated with Lowbrow, an art movement that borrows from popular culture, as
Warhol did.
Also like Pop Art, these
works have an upbeat or campy tone and are well-crafted, often using a drawing
style akin to advertising art and graphic novels.
The show was organized by
Hakimzadeh with guest curator Jason Levesque of Norfolk, a nationally noted
Lowbrow artist. This is a "custom" show, Levesque said, giving a
bunch of artists the same item and allowing them free rein to reinterpret it.
Here, each artist was
mailed a plain soup can.
Chet Zar of Los Angeles
covered his can in a Campbell's Tomato Soup wrapper, opened it, turned it
upside down and sculpted worms to pour from it. That's Zar's comment on how
Warhol opened a can of worms with his approach to art.
Diana Caramat, who teaches
at the Governor's School for the Arts in Norfolk, came up with the most
elaborate piece. She turned her can into a functioning printing press and
designed an image of the can to be printed off of it.
She titled it "Self
Important Can Exploits the Press."
Caramat's prints are sold
in the museum's gift shop, and any of these 34 re-created cans may be purchased
on the MOCA website.
Warhol would have loved
that.
