The Best And Worst Of Warhol

By ROBERT HUGHES

New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which showed no great enthusiasm for Andy Warhol while he was alive, went after him con brio as soon as he was dead. The bakemeats were barely cold upon the funeral table when the word went out that MOMA was going to give Warhol the palladium of a full-scale retrospective -- his first in New York since the more premature effort that went on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Whether MOMA wanted to get the crowds before a rival museum did, or simply to get the job over and out of the way, is uncertain: probably both.

Of the 273 works in the show, more than a third are from Warhol's estate, mostly very early or very late ones, though no special interest attaches to "Warhol's Warhols" beyond the circumstance that they were unsold at the time of his death. Nevertheless, despite this compliance with their sales pitch, the guardians of Warhol's name and estate (who are busy marketing his aura like a combination of Jesus Christ's and Donald Duck's) are reportedly miffed by the form that the show took at the hands of its curator, Kynaston McShine. The show's emphasis falls on Warhol up to 1968, the year he was shot by a mad lumpen-feminist named Valerie Solanis, one of the hangers-on at his studio, the Factory. The treatment of post-1970 and especially of 1980s Warhol is, by comparison, skimpy.

Is this fair to Warhol? No, if you are among those who think he was the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock, a genius whose spirit continues to brood over American culture and to infuse the best young art of our time. Yes, if you think that Warhol had about five remarkable years (1962-67) followed by a long downhill slide into money-raking banality, with his social portraits and his silk-screen editions of dogs, famous Jews of the 20th century and Mercedes; or that his actual influence on younger artists varied from liberating to moderately disastrous. The show fills in details in one's knowledge of Warhol's work -- for instance, how his fascination with the repeated image was there from his earliest days as an illustrator -- but does not change one's sense of its basic priorities.

Much of the work, in fact, now seems an appendage to Warhol's most authoritative creation: his fame -- the meticulous construction of a persona vivid in its coy blandness, pervasive and teasing in its appeal to the media, and deathlessly inorganic. Warhol looked like the last dandy, right from the start of his public career. As the late critic Harold Rosenberg put it, he was "the figure of the artist as nobody, though a nobody with a resounding signature." This subverted the romantic stereotype of the artist -- hot, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence -- that American popular culture, and hence most American collectors, had boiled down from Van Gogh and Pollock.

Instead, in Warhol one had the detached art-supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn.

The sense of deja vu one gets from the show is hardly the curator's fault. It is built into the career itself. Warhol's paintings came out of a culture of mass production and reproduction, and have been run back through it so widely and often that they contain very few surprises. With a few piercing exceptions, they seem generic. His Mona Lisas are by now as famous as Leonardo's, especially for people who don't care much for old art. (Except that, for a lot of the audience, they are old art -- mysterious icons of the remote '60s.) On the whole, the sense of expansion and refreshment one feels in going from a reproduction of a well-known painting to its original is lacking, because his paintings are all based on silk-screen reproduction of photographic images. Whether flat and grainy, as in the '60s, or worked up with a creamy slather of broad-brush pigment, as in the '70s and '80s, they are essentially simulations of the act of painting, types of visual packaging.

Warhol began and ended as a commercial illustrator; what lies between is the interesting stuff. He was an adroit draftsman but not a distinguished one. He soon overcame the influences of his early advertising days (Jean Cocteau and Ben Shahn), but the drawing is never more than efficient. Partly for this reason his freehand "studies" of soup cans or dollar bills never acquire the pressure of the silk-screened ones, but it is hard to see how they could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments on the standardization of mass taste in American art. On desire, Warhol could be dreadfully accurate. His idea of silk-screening Marilyn Monroe's disembodied smile 168 times over derived, no doubt, from Man Ray's painting of Kiki de Montparnasse's lips floating in the Paris sky, but the feeling is quite different. It is about the administration of fantasy by media, not the enjoyment of fantasy by lovers.

Warhol's power, uneven as it was, lay in an emotional narrative that contradicted its cold, fixed, iconic surface. He unskeined a story in which a horror of the world, verging sometimes on acute dread, mingled with an artificial calm and a desire for transcendence. Try as one may, one cannot imagine Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, being painted by anyone but a Roman Catholic homosexual; it is both completely camp in its pseudo-Byzantine extravagance and, in its identification of the star with the Madonna, yearningly devotional. Here, Warhol is Genet in paint. So too with the "disasters" and the electric chairs of the early and mid-'60s, which are truly awful in their curt, grainy enunciation of the facts of casual or ceremonial death. The sign on the wall of the death chamber -- SILENCE -- provides an essential motif of Warhol's imagination, and it was hardly an accident of gesture that his best-known self-portrait has his finger on his lips.

But the intensity of these early images is closely linked to the rapture with which Warhol first discovered his own ability to use detachment -- to make art with what he had, out of his sense that high art had actually dissolved into mass media. When this ceased to surprise him, his work came too pat. It coarsened and turned industrial. Even his later images of foreboding and death, like the skulls, are trashily melodramatic by comparison with what had gone before, while his inflated recyclings of Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Leonardo's Last Supper could scarcely be more pointless. In the end he was stranded in a plenitude of subjects with nothing to paint.