June 10, 2005Warhol and Rubens: Picture Them as Peas in a Pod
By HOLLAND COTTER
BEACON, N.Y. , June 4 - Let's be devils and call Andy Warhol the Rubens of American art. Why not? Everything Rubens did, Warhol did, and more: portraits, religious paintings, history paintings, still lifes, landscapes (well, cityscapes), mythological subjects (Marilyn, Liza, Mao) and scads of drawings. You will find some of all of this, along with films and photographs, in "Dia's Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage," a scrambled, surveyish exhibition here at Dia:Beacon that is more interesting than it probably should be.
Warhol, like Rubens, was an artist-entrepreneur. Chronically overbooked, he did a certain amount of work himself, but farmed out a lot to assistants, adding signature swipes as needed. Both were court painters ever alert for commissions, and statesmen in civic and social spheres. Rubens ran diplomatic missions for the great kings of Europe; Warhol interviewed disco queens at Studio 54.
Of course, there were personal differences. Rubens was a robust jock, very married, very straight; Andy (Dynel wigs; size 30 briefs; nickname: Drella) was not. Both were culturally erudite. Rubens had people read Virgil to him as he worked; Warhol played Maria Callas and the Supremes, nonstop and often simultaneously, in his studio. And both were notable communicators. Rubens spoke several languages fluently. Warhol spoke one, American English, sometimes fluently, sometimes not, depending on the company, and listened like crazy to everyone, gossip radar always on.
Yawning is a way of talking, he once said, and he routinely dropped into comatose mode in the presence of people he didn't know or like. Initially, he did so out of nervousness; there was a candid, clowning side to his personality, which probably got him into trouble as an effeminate kid. As an adult he figured out that silence could be protective camouflage, even a source of power. He developed it as a personal style, though he was verbally as sharp as a tack when he wanted to be.
His art operates the same way. With its apparently random images, stuttering repetitions and production glitches, it can look asleep at the wheel when it is, in fact, scarily wide awake. It is certainly awake enough to bring some bounce and sting to this show, which really has no urgent reason for being except to celebrate two occasions: the second anniversary of the opening of the Dia:Beacon and the 10th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, co-founded by the Dia Art Foundation.
Manhattan has had more than its share of Warhol gallery shows recently, mostly of late work, and some of them looked thin. (An exception is an ambitious gathering of portraits at Tony Shafrazi in Chelsea through Aug. 5.) But any exhibition that brings some of his early silkscreen paintings to the fore, as the Dia show does, is worthy of notice.
They are among about 80 paintings, many commissioned directly from Warhol, that Dia gave to the Pittsburgh museum. And they pretty much represent the foundation's entire Warhol inventory, apart from the extraordinary multipanel "Shadows" (1978-79), which is on permanent view at Dia.
So, mostly, the show is a visit from old friends: 1960's "Disaster" paintings, 1970's celebrity portraits, paintings after Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" done just before Warhol's sudden death in 1987. There are, however, some significant additions. The paintings are supplemented by a group of his Brillo boxes from the Norton Simon Museum in California. The art historian Douglas Crimp has organized a summerlong program of Warhol's paradigm-altering early films. And material from Warhol's "Time Capsules" is making a public debut.
Warhol was a pack rat. (So was Rubens, who hoarded antique sculpture.) He saved letters, invitations, snapshots, magazines, playbills, interview transcriptions, candy wrappers, liquor samples, prescription vials; you name it. He tossed them into cardboard boxes which he periodically sealed and labeled by month and year. More than 600 such boxes - "Time Capsules" - were in storage when he died. The Andy Warhol Museum is gradually examining them, and four have been opened, and their contents displayed, for this show.
In a sense the exhibition itself is a time capsule of Warhol's career. It doesn't offer any huge new angle on it. But as is sometimes the case, a thrown-together mix of his art can bring out what is substantial and deep - subterranean - about it, in ways that seeing individual series may not.
The mixing and layering is straightforward in the light, bright-looking installation on Dia's main floor, where a suite of smallish gallery spaces have been covered with grid-patterned wallpaper designed by Warhol from a single repeated drawing of the Washington Monument.
All the paintings are hung, as the artist preferred, against this visually active ground, beginning with several "Disasters" from 1963-64. They were based on rejected press photographs of car wrecks and suicides, images considered too gruesome or indecorous for print. In one, a man has been thrown from his burning car and impaled on a spike on a telephone pole, a fate weirdly echoed in the sharp point of the obelisk on the wallpaper backdrop.
This all-over image of the Washington Monument - bladelike, phallic, exclamatory - turns the whole show, a quarter-century of art, into an extended "disaster" series, with portraits of yesterday's Beautiful People, now aging, dead or forgotten, and paintings of skulls and Warhol's skull-like self-portrait. Even the Brillo boxes, neatly laid out on the floor, take on a funerary cast; they are like a plot of look-alike sepulchers.
They are also roughly the same size and shape as the "Time Capsule" cartons, whose contents fill vitrines in a dimly lighted, cryptlike basement gallery. The items include 1950's fashion magazines, souvenirs of the early Pop years, and tawdry relics of the glitter-addled pre-AIDS 1970's. Their collective effect is dispiriting: history as a jumble sale of trivia, with everything, including art, pulled downward toward the dirt.
Or is it the other way around? Maybe we should be seeing history raised up. Warhol called the "Time Capsules" art; they were part of what he did, a series like all his other series. Each box is an assemblage, however accidentally or deliberately shaped, of a specific life in a specific culture. Some people saw Warhol as a vampire sucking the vital juices out of that culture. I see him as vitalizing agent who encouraged America to start paying attention to its suicidal tendencies, to start taking its own erratic, racing pulse.
He talked about the things that got that pulse pumping - death, sex, evil, glamour - in a way no one else had, and broke fresh ground for American art and thought. You get a sense of his method in the early films that flicker away in the dark, literally underground at Dia, like the illicit gay-porn movies Warhol knew from the 1950's. The images are mostly of people doing ordinary things like eating, sleeping and kissing. And just by looking - staring and staring - Warhol makes the ordinary look erotic, absurd and endangered.
Not that any of this turns him into a saint, or a hero, or even a likable guy, though a lot of artists like what he did. (Open any Warhol survey catalog and you'll see at a glance where many of today's stars came from, from Gerhard Richter and Andreas Gursky to Elizabeth Peyton and Damien Hirst.) Nor is he at all a "moral" artist in the way Rubens - the classicist, the Roman Catholic humanist - was. Which doesn't mean Warhol's art isn't seriously about morality.
Rubens believed that he lived in a diminished and degenerate age, "decay'd and corrupted" by a succession of "vices and accidents" in his words. He hated it, and constantly looked to an ancient past for a consoling model of virtue. Warhol, who went to Mass every Sunday, was similarly aware that the world was weak and corrupt, but he loved it, because it was there, and he was in it. Corruption, to him, made an endlessly fascinating study. For weakness, he had a soft heart. His Golden Age was his childhood, which he doggedly tried to recreate. In short, he saw decay where Rubens saw decay, but he also saw beauty. Who, in the end, had the truer eye?
