An American pop artist after Jasper Johns and RobertRauschenberg, Warhol's heyday came in the 1960s. But by the time of his deathin 1987, he had yet to squander his 15 minutes of fame. His prolific outputduring the last 10 years of his life is the focus of the Milwaukee Art Museum'smajor exhibition, “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade,” which chronicles the artist'sfinal years before his death at age 58 from complications following gallbladder surgery.
The show's curator, Joseph Ketner, hopes to createawareness that there is more to Warhol's legacy than celebrities and Brilloboxes. He points out that the public's understanding of Warhol is based on arelative sliver of his oeuvre: “[Warhol] worked for 40 years,” Ketner says.“What happened the rest of the time? Our whole public image of him is builtupon a four-year period.” It was a car-crash painting from Warhol's “Death andDisaster” series, made in the early '60s, that served as the impetus for theshow, and for Ketner's “revelation” that Warhol was “not just a Pop figure whodoes soup cans and celebrities, but deals with these very difficult subjects.”
Whether tacit or explicit, Warhol's preoccupationwith death continued well past the “Death and Disaster” series, as is evidentin “The Last Decade.”In the 1978diptych Self-Portrait with Skull,what remains of Yorick is perched on the artist's shoulder. In Self-Portrait (Strangulation), createdthe same year, the artist is pictured six times, a pair of disembodied handsclasped around his neck.
The themes of “The Last Decade”are not entirely macabre. Warhol's interplay between hand drawingand mechanical reproduction is central to the exhibit, and to understandingWarhol's profound impact on the art world. In contrast to Jackson Pollock andthe Abstract Expressionists, Andy Warhol was the antithesis of the artist asübermasculine painter of his id. The action painter rendered his expressionwith lashings of pure color; when Warhol cut off the artist's hand, the machinesprang forth in its place.
Incorporating silk-screen overlays on hand-paintedsurfaces, Warhol used printmaking and photographic techniques as an extensionofrather than an exclusion ofthe artist's hand. The silk-screen canvas Fancy Yarn (1983), which comprises fourpanels, mimics the energy of Pollock's action paintings without the“authenticity” of the artist's physical gesture. It is his ability to “play offthe dichotomy of the hand and the machine” that interests Ketner about Warhol'slater work.
Trained as a commercial artist, Warhol worked in the1950s as an illustrator for Vogue anddesigned record covers for RCA. In his final years, Warhol returned to handdrawing and painting, collaborating with Francesco Clemente and Jean-MichelBasquiat on Alba's Breakfast and Origin ofCotton.
Monumental scale in the later works, such as The LastSupper, which spans 6.5 by 25.5 feet, is central to understandingWarhol's work in the 1980s, according to Ketner. The reason, he says, istwofold: “Part of it was based upon the simple factthat Warhol had larger places in which to paint. But another part of it wasthat even though many of these are commissioned works, a lot of these were verypersonal to him, part of that ambition to create his artistic legacy. He madeextraordinarily huge paintings, larger than any he did at any other time in hiscareer. And when a visitor comes through the gallery, you will see things thatwill completely envelop your space.”
MAM's chief curator, Brady Roberts, concurs. “It's going to be experiential. You can think about it andread about it and look at the [catalog], but the experience of seeing the showis going to be incredibly powerful.”
“Andy Warhol: The Last Decade” opens Sept. 26 (through Jan.3, 2010) at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
