Andy Warhol - Part Three

   Andy and His Art - Part Three


     Warhol's painting polarized the art world. Some saw his art as trash. "Warhol's work for me," wrote the British art critic Peter Fuller, "is style unredeemed by an iota of expressivity; he is fundamentally inauthentic."
    Warhol epitomized, says Fuller, what went wrong in painting, from the 1960's to the 1980's.
     Yet Arthur Danto, a philosopher and art critic for 'The Nation' loved Warhol's work. 'Brillo Boxes' which copied the original Brillo Boxes, took art and art history to a new level, Danto claimed. It raised fundamental questions about what art is and what art could be. For Danto, Warhol's work led to what he called, 'The end of art'. And Danto went on to write books or at least one book with that title. Warhol, Danto claimed, played a pivotal role in the changing of art.
    For Arthur Danto, after Warhol came along, the world of the fine arts could never be the same.
    Now there's no doubt that Andy Warhol `did change the world of the elite fine arts. Warhol was part of the 'Pop Art' movement that brought the image and images back into the art world. In the early 1960's, artists like Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claus Oldenburgh and Patti Oldenburgh, Robert Indiana and above all Warhol, reached out into the world of mass culture for their subjects.
     Lichtenstein painted or re-arranged comic strips into big pictures. Others like the Oldenburghs took small foods like hot dogs and blew them up into massive sculptures. These artists and others like them did transform in an imaginative way the images they found in mass culture.
     Warhol didn't really do this. He just copied photos, pictures of celebrities and even foods like Campbell soup cans and silk screened them. This was a major shift in emphasis in the world of the fine arts. Before the Pop Artists came along, the reigning painters in the fine arts world were the Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Wilhelm de Kooning, and Franz Kline. "I am nature," Pollock told the German emigre artist Hans Hoffman. "Your theories don't concern me. Put up or shut up."
     Pollock and others, helped by the Central Intelligence Agency turned New York City into the centre of the art world and dethroned Paris from its formerly ruling art perch at the top of the heap. Most of the Abstract Expressionists were big macho men with sizeable egos to match. They railed against mass culture and proclaimed themselves alienated from American society. They supposedly looked into themselves to create their mostly abstract paintings.
    Anything that looked like something in the real world, they denounced as 'illustrative'. It was simply inferior art.
    Warhol turned the tables on the abstract Expressionists. He painted images from mass culture. He was delicate looking an talked in a fragile sometimes whispering style. He looked fragile and he was. He loved American culture, film stars and American products. "I love Hollywood," Warhol said. "I love plastic." Most counter cultural people in the 1960's loathed plastic, seeing it as a synthetic anti-human substance that was phoney.
     Warhol's practice of using other people 's photos sometimes led to trouble. One artist sued him for using her photos of flowers in one of his silk screen series. Yet mostly Warhol got away with using other people's photos. In the end he made a fortune taking photos of wealthy people and then smearing paint on the photos. Rich people paid Warhol top dollars for their portraits by him.