‘Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth And Basquiat’ At The Farnsworth Art Museum

Rockland, Maine

:They were an unlikely artistic trio: Pop Art icon Andy Warhol, realist Jamie Wyeth and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. But in the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol collaborated with the two young artists from opposite poles of the art world in ways that augmented their reputations and reenergized the older man's work.

"Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat" traces how Warhol (1928–1987), an established art megastar, invited first Wyeth (b 1946) and later Basquiat (1960–1988) to paint at the "Factory," his New York studio. Warhol mentored the two younger artists, and they, in turn, enabled him to connect with new audiences in the changing art world.

The exhibition, comprising more than 80 paintings, works on paper and artifacts, was organized by the Brandywine River Museum, and seen there last year and more recently at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. It will be on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum through August 26. The show is guest curated by Joyce Hill Stoner, director of the preservation studies program at the University of Delaware.

Warhol, the Pittsburgh-born eccentric, studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before coming to New York City to work as an illustrator and commercial artist in the 1950s. In 1960, he began to execute paintings based on comic strip characters, like Superman, and multiple images of commercial products, such as Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. He then began to use the photo-silkscreen process to make pictures based on preexisting mass communications and advertising images. He famously turned out repetitive portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy as widow and Chairman Mao Zedong.

Warhol transformed everyday imagery — supermarket products, celebrity photographs and tabloid covers — into a new kind of art that seemed as superficial and devoid of comment as the things he chose to represent. As art critic Robert Hughes has written, Warhol "was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity — the famous image of a person, the famous brand name — had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity." What matters, Warhol observed, was that "in the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes."

In the 1960s, Warhol established an enormous studio, the Factory, where friends and assistants carried out much of his work and helped him sell artlike products off an assembly line. Fascinated by stardom and abetted by his entourage, Warhol cultivated his image as a cultural celebrity.

In 1968, as Warhol's career began to take off, a psychotic young woman walked into the Factory and shot him. Because he almost died, he, along with slain public leaders of his time, became a symbol of those who paid a price for leading the country into a new era.

By 1970, Warhol's imaginative work and carefully cultivated public persona put him on top of the art scene. In this context, it is fascinating that Warhol reached out to two younger artists, Wyeth and Basquiat, whose worlds could not have been more different than his. Rosenblum suggests that their relationships "help[ed] rejuvenate the aging master."