In his huge acrylic on canvas "Rorschach” series of 1984, Warhol translated black blobs and drips into towering works of art. Examples like this, with gold backgrounds and measuring more than 13 by 9 feet, "radiate the opulence of grand gates,” says Ketner. The Baltimore Museum of Art, purchase with funds provided by Laura R. Burrows-Jackson, Baltimore; and partial gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. —Mitro Hood photo, ©2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York City
:Few American artists have had careers as influential and controversial as Andy Warhol (1928–1987). In the nearly quarter-century since his death, his quirky persona has often seemed to overwhelm his art, but it has also contributed to enduring interest in his work. Museum and gallery exhibitions exploring facets of his output continue to draw eager crowds.
A case in point is "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade," comprising more than 50 works that reveal the energy, vitality and experimentation of his late career. Organized for the Milwaukee Art Museum by its former chief curator and now Emerson College art professor Joseph D. Ketner II, and already seen in Milwaukee and at the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, it is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through September 12.
Most writings and exhibitions about Warhol have focused on the eight-year Pop period of his career. This show, the first to zero in on the artist's concluding years, seeks to rectify that imbalance by offering new perspectives on that phase. "When we examine the last decade of Warhol's career, we witness a mature artist bringing his own oeuvre full circle, sweeping the early images for which he is so well known into a complex dance of painting and printing, abstraction and representation, surface and meaning," suggests Ketner.
Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Penn., Warhol studied art there at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1945–1949, before moving to New York City, where he foreshortened his name. Working for 13 years as a commercial illustrator and department store window designer, he honed his skills as a draftsman, won significant awards and was well compensated by prestigious clients.
At the same time, with an eye on a career in the fine arts, Warhol continued to draw, paint and make collages, often incorporating commercial techniques into his processes.
By the early 1960s, influenced by the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and other artists moving away from the prevailing Abstract Expressionism, Warhol began adapting advertising and comic book images as subjects for painting.
During the last year of his life, in a burst of revelatory religious works based on Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper,” Warhol created a variety of colored images of the iconic painting. Derived from a reproduction rather than the original, to avoid comparisons, Warhol's "The Last Supper,” 1986, offers a gold-suffused version of the famous gathering. The Baltimore Museum of Art, purchase with exchange funds from Harry A. Bernstein Memorial collection. —Mitro Hood photo, ©2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York City
After briefly applying painterly brushwork to images of such comic-strip characters as Popeye, Superman and Dick Tracy, he used smooth, impersonal finishes to depict a wide range of subjects, including Campbell's Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills, stamps, newspaper pages and dance-step diagrams. These were often in multiple images, arranged like postage stamps and in idiosyncratic colors.
Warhol soon began to reproduce his work in quantity using silkscreen techniques. While many were single images, some were in multiples, an allusion to modern industrial techniques of reproduction. Underscoring the impersonal nature of his art, he called his Manhattan studio The Factory.
