May 24, 2002
A Warhol Retrospective Comes to Los Angeles
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
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| Misha Erwitt for The New York Times |
| Jeremy Strick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The city has a symbiotic relationship with Andy Warhol. |
LOS ANGELES, May 22 — Andy Warhol lived in New York, but Los Angeles was his spiritual home. The Pop painter of iconic celebrity portraits — Liz, Marilyn, Elvis and Jackie — obscured the line between art and popular culture. He partied with the rich and famous. Even his shallowness mirrors a culture consumed with blockbusters and sitcoms.
"Warhol was enthralled by Hollywood movies — he grew up watching Shirley Temple films — as well as the culture of celebrity," said Jeremy Strick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. On Saturday the museum opens one of the most extensive retrospectives of Warhol's work. "Warhol somehow seems appropriate for L.A.," Mr. Strick said.
And Los Angeles is reciprocating. The exhibition — which brings together a total of more than 200 Warhol paintings, drawings and sculptures — has become a citywide event comparable to the opening of a summer action film. The show is the first significant survey of Warhol since 1989, two years after his death, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a major retrospective.
Banners and billboards are promoting the show all over town. In an unprecedented move, the city has donated $250,000 to defray expenses and lure tourists to the show, which is sponsored by Merrill Lynch & Company. The Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau is offering package deals at 10 hotels. Because of the expense of mounting the exhibition, which has a budget of about $2 million, ticket prices are unusually high. Adult admission is $12 on weekdays and $17 on weekends. It is usually $8.
The hoopla surrounding the exhibition seems appropriate for Warhol, who seemed obsessed with consumerism and self-promotion. The show, which occupies all of the museum's 25,000-square-feet of gallery space, was organized by the art historian Heiner Bastian for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin last year. It was not intended to travel, but when the Tate Modern in London booked it earlier this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art began a vigorous effort to extend the tour to Los Angeles, the only American stop. "We wanted this show very much," Mr. Strick said. "There's a long history of Warhol's presence in Los Angeles, and there has not been a major exhibition in Los Angeles of his work since 1970 at the Pasadena Museum."
The show spans Warhol's career, from the early 1940's until 1986, one year before he died at 58 after gallbladder surgery. Included are the Campbell's soup cans and the portraits ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Mao Zedong. But there are many less famous early drawings from the 1940's, as well as the first hand-painted black-and-white works depicting common objects of the 1960's. The exhibition also features Warhol's last major series of paintings, based on Leonardo's "Last Supper."
Mr. Bastian, who is in Los Angeles for the opening, said he considered Warhol "the most important chronicler of the second half of the last century." He added that Warhol radically changed the language of art.
"He closes the gap between fiction and reality, between the duality of life and art," he said.
"Warhol's paintings are not about something," he continued. "His work exists without an essence. The source is taken directly from life without any emotion."
Such views of the artist's significance stir controversy. Hilton Kramer, a former art critic for The New York Times, once wrote in The Times that Warhol's focus was "to win attention in the marketplace" and that he exploited the fame of stars in work that was "both glib and slick."
Ivan Karp, owner and president of the OK Harris gallery in New York, helped discover Warhol and was a close friend of his until his death. His achievements are "limited in scope," Mr. Karp said in a telephone interview, the best work done from 1961 to 1966. "There's a legitimate contribution there, but the work after that becomes ornamental, decorative and vacuous," he added. During his strongest period, Warhol produced his Marilyn, Liz and Elvis portraits, as well as his "Disaster" series, with its themes of suicide, the electric chair, race riots and car crashes.
Mr. Karp said that he considered Warhol of "some significance" in the 20th century, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and other Pop artists. "They did change the pictorial climate of realism and the attitude toward subjects," he added.
He said that the objects of everyday life, once considered unworthy by many artists, were transformed by painters like Warhol and Lichtenstein.
Warhol's affinity for Los Angeles dated to the 1960's, said Mr. Strick, the museum director. His first solo exhibition, of 32 Campbell's soup can paintings, was presented in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. The Elvis portraits followed in 1963. Dennis Hopper, the actor and art collector, held a party for Warhol to introduce him to Los Angeles artists and celebrities. "That group of people caught on to Warhol's work early and appreciated him," Mr. Strick said. Warhol was certainly obsessed with celebrities, even if his artistic reputation fades, he will be known for his oft-quoted comment, "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
Warhol became consumed with movies in the 1960's, making numerous 16-millimeter films like "Chelsea Girls," "Empire," "Sleep," "Kiss" and "Lonesome Cowboys." He made many of the films in his studio, known as the Factory, where members of his entourage — alternately beautiful and bizarre — hung out. It was at the Factory in 1968 that one of his followers, Valerie Solanis, shot Warhol and nearly killed him.
"Many of his most famous images, having to do with the culture of celebrity, were generated in Los Angeles," Mr. Strick said. "No one understood the nature of celebrity better than Warhol. He's so ubiquitous, so pervasive, he's infiltrated the culture at so many levels, that perhaps the true nature of his achievement has been somewhat obscured." (Last week, sales of Warhol works at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg brought strong prices.)
Warhol seemed to sum up his work in 1967. "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am," he told an interviewer. "There's nothing behind it."
