Just opened at the San Diego Museum of Art is the widely anticipated selection of legendary screen prints by Andy Warhol, one of America’s foremost graphic artists.
Warhol is probably best known for his prints of Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Chairman Mao, Jacqueline Kennedy, and others. Included in the exhibition are the famous Campbell soup cans and “The Souper,” a cotton paper dress decorated with screen prints of the Campbell’s label. It is a real pleasure to view these images up close. The collection of prints is from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Warhol began making screen prints in 1962, which soon became the main focus of his art, and he was one of the first major artists to use silk-screen printing for art rather than commercial use. The process itself was introduced as an art medium during the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.
Silk-screening was the perfect foil for Warhol’s photographic images, which became recognizable as fine art. Collecting was Warhol’s passion and included pulp movie magazines and publicity portraits and images of news disasters, all of which were often the subjects of his art. Warhol was fascinated with the macabre ” the Marilyn Monroe screen prints were made in 1962, shortly after her death, and the series of Elizabeth Taylor were created after her severe illness.
The Kennedy series appeared after the president’s assassination in Dallas in 1963. Warhol found that in time, death, when repeated visually, was no longer a gruesome outrage.
A photograph of Marilyn Monroe by Milton H. Green became the basis for the series of his 10 Monroe prints. After Warhol’s treatment of the photograph, Monroe was no longer looked upon as an actress, but became a sex symbol, cult figure and icon. The pastel tones of lavender, lime and light blues juxtaposed with harsher colors of reds, oranges, deep greens and purple in abstract color variations of Monroe’s face is shocking. The hideous straw-colored curly hair is conspicuous in all the prints.
Mao, in all of his pomposity and with his button-down collar, perfect hair and leering side glance are transposed in all solid facial colors. From lime green to jet black, brown, and deep midnight gray, the colors invoke a harshness of the political figure. On some of the prints Warhol has silk-screened hand-drawn lines over the surface, leading to more complex images than first noted. The Mao images were considered the most visually complex in their brilliant colors; the series was from an image that appeared on Mao’s book of famous sayings, produced in 1972, the same year that Nixon made his historic trip to China.
A lesser-known series of “Electric Chairs” and “Wallpaper” startles the viewer in its complexity. In 1971, Warhol exhibited the electric chair in the forefront of a wallpaper of red cow heads on a yellow background. The cow wallpaper was the first screen print used as wallpaper. Warhol experimented with wallpaper in 1966, and at his retirement from art at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York, Warhol decorated the gallery with the cow wallpaper and silver helium-filled Mylar balloons.
The concept of the repeated image elevated wallpaper to a fine art status, making the room a work of art. The abutting of the repeated imagery of the cow’s head with the haunting image of the electric chair conveys a sense of the absurd.
The 1975 Mick Jagger series takes on a completely abstract form with collages blocking out facial features. The young Jagger’s patterns show the petulant artist in different poses, splashed with a minimum of color. Warhol further enhanced the images with charcoal line drawings that exaggerate the features around Jagger’s lips and eyes.
Warhol selected personalities and elevated the stars by immortalizing them into formidable objects transforming the subject from celebrity to symbol.
“Shoe Series with Diamond Dust” is a grouping of five images, displaying high-heeled shoes in orange, red, pink, magenta, green, purple, blacks and grays, blue greens and black and white. The series is a reminder of an earlier time when Warhol produced advertising ink drawings for I Miller shoe company. The diamond dust is a reminder of glamour, and was created from ground-up industrial grade diamonds and thrown by hand on the silk screens while they were wet. It connotes high style, but also conveys superficiality, as it reduces the diamond’s worth by using it only as a decorative element.
There are many other fascinating screen prints to see and in celebration of The San Diego Museum of Art’s 80th birthday, this is a marvelous gift to the community as we have an opportunity to delve deeper into the work of an extremely complex and eccentric artist.
San Diego Museum of Art is located at 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park. For information, call (619) 232-7931. The Worhol exhibit runs through Sept. 10.