Warhol, Andy
born: 1928 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
died: 1987 New York

Practically from the beginning, standardization was the subject of Andy Warhol's art. In 1962 he transferred banknotes, soup cans, match covers, paint-by-numbers paintings, and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley to canvas, and rapidly became the quintessential Pop Artist. In his hand-painted works Warhol usually limited himself to reproducing banal things from the commercial realm. Yet it is remarkable how often he showed traces of human use of these things: the dollar bills wrinkled, the matchbook (as in the version in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne) with scratch marks on the sandpaper striking surface, the paint-by-numbers landscape partially filled in. Warhol quite faithfully reproduced his chosen motifs, without alienating them, except as regards enlargement. He seemed to have a sympathetic attitude to such trivial everyday things. Even the dubious activity of producing an oil painting by matching premixed, numbered paints to the numbers printed on a canvas board - entailing a suffocation of creativity, if not the end of art per se - turned in Warhol's hands into a landscape that is not without its charm and humor. In the case of his silkscreen works we are confronted with an entirely different world. Repetition lends the banal motifs an anonymous and somehow threatening character. They become less real, as if the artist had consciously placed them at a farther remove from reality. When we compare the color schemes of the hand-painted imagery with those of the serigraph-printed canvases, we see that the colars in the matchbook and the landscape are bright, warm, and saturated, while those afthe silkscreens seem coal, faded, and without body. Form is no longer determined by color; rather, the form appears to dissolve in the translucency of the color. Whether you take the pale green of the doilar bilis or the theatrical red merging into cloying pink of the Race Riot, the co(or heightens the unreality of the image, which now is no (onger depicted from reality or nature but is based on a reproduction, and thus can be considered a "second-hand reality" at best. The perversion of human values in a mechanized world is implied particularly in the portraits Warhol began making after he adopted the serigraph technique. All af these were based on photographs, usually made for public-relations purposes, and the printing method only served to heighten the cool, impersonal, idol-like character of the person represented. Warhol's silver Two Elvis shows no flesh-and-blood human being but the product of a commercialized society. A series of motifs related to violence and death began with 129 Die inJet, a canvas that was still painted freehand. The newspaper article describes the death of 129 American tourists as a result of a plane crash at Paris-Orly. The huge, blatant headline and the word "Final" which cold-bioodedly bracket the illustration contrast to its painted rendering, whose mood of despair and hopelessness recalls the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. By comparison, the serigraph work Red Race Riot resists emotional empathy despite the equally disturbing nature of the event depicted. The image, based on two newspaper photos of a police action against black demonstrators, is composed like a film sequence. Yet there is no political statement implied. As Susan Sontag said, pictures consume reality; the more often one is confronted with pictures, the less real the event concerned appears. It is precisely this loss of reality that Warhol addresses in his ceuvre.
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