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| Andy Warhol, "Last Supper", 1986 |
Andy Warhol more than any artist helped shape the visual culture of post-World War II America. Often considered a Pop artist, I wanted to look at Warhol as a representational artist and to see how he changed American art. I believe Warhol completely changed the ideological foundation of representational art from operating under the influence of French agrarianism (hand and land) to that of American capitalism (machine and money).
Pop art as a movement came along after Abstract Expressionism. The Abstract Expressionists broke with artists of the past by working with both a personal symbolism and by dismissing the notion of looking at nature. Pop art contained objects, subject matter, figures and portraits. It was a representational art that had all of the aspects of art that the Abstract Expressionist painters wanted to leave behind.
Warhol was trained as a traditional illustrator and his work in the 1950s resembles the shaky pen and ink linear style of Ben Shahn, a leading artist of the previous generation of Social Realists. This linear style has many artistic precedences and can be seen in the work of the French Neo-Classicist Ingres or the British Classical draftsman John Flaxman. Warhol from his earliest days as an illustration student was an heir to a tradition of representational art and, unlike Abstract Expressionism, was one that remained fascinated by image making and representation.
Before we continue, it’s important to consider the foundational ideas of representational art for a moment.
Warhol was trained as a traditional illustrator and his work in the 1950s resembles the shaky pen and ink linear style of Ben Shahn, a leading artist of the previous generation of Social Realists. This linear style has many artistic precedences and can be seen in the work of the French Neo-Classicist Ingres or the British Classical draftsman John Flaxman. Warhol from his earliest days as an illustration student was an heir to a tradition of representational art and, unlike Abstract Expressionism, was one that remained fascinated by image making and representation.
Before we continue, it’s important to consider the foundational ideas of representational art for a moment.
In the late nineteenth century most professional American artist were trained in France. The French artists and teachers at that time taught a Romantic Realism (Gerome), Classical Realism (Bougereau), Naturalism (Breton) or, to a lesser extent, Impressionism. Each movement had its origins in the French Realist movement of the 1850s (notable examples are Courbet and Millet). Arguably mid-century French Realism was the strongest influence on early twentieth century representational American art.
There were three main principles of French Realism:
1.) indebted to the philosophical movement of empiricism, these artists were keen to depict what could be seen by one’s eyes;
2.) they were influenced by Socialism and were concerned for the poor over that of a growing wealthy class; and
3.) they romanticized an agrarian lifestyle that stood in strong contrast to the newly developing industrialized world.
Warhol broke with each of these and replaced it with a new form of representational art that was ahistorical and non-traditional. We’ll take a look at each in turn.
Warhol used silk screening as a method of image production and though his work was hand made, it wasn’t made from scratch. Rather, Warhol made aesthetic selections from a set of pre-designed objects; he selected photos of items or products, already in the market place. His personal style and resulting individualism were due to recombining existing elements in a unique way. By contrast, the French Realists had a firm belief in objective observation and full faith in their ability to accurately depict what they saw. They were not concerned with aesthetic choices as an end in itself. They lived at a time when they believed that reality was knowable and it probably never crossed their minds to be interested in a system of objects and signs from which reality is selected and constructed.
Warhol depicted everyday objects that were newly available to the consumer. Their mass produced uniformity ensured that they were the same regardless of the income level of the purchaser. Additionally, Warhol worked with popular imagery of glamorous stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Elvis Presley. These images represented a type of symbolic American royalty. Their glamour is what inspired awe from others and set theses stars apart from everyone else. The French Realists wanted to paint what they saw and what they saw was a disparity between the wealthy class and the peasant class. They were concerned with depicting a social condition of poverty not consumerism. They chose to show the struggles of the peasant class depicting them as individuals, not symbols, whose lives were shaped by long hours of work. Their paintings were made as a criticism against the encroaching ideas of the new enterprising industrialists.
Warhol desired to remove the evidence of the handmade from his work and to emulate the machine. Warhol’s machine minded outlook was in direct opposition to the rustic aesthetic of the French Realist. The French Realist depicted laborers working with their hands and felt there was dignity to manual labor. Warhol often worked with serialization and repetition to foreground the mass produced aspect of products. Mass production allowed large profits to be accrued through fast and efficient productivity. Mass production of such a large scale was only possible due to the use of machines in industry. The French Realists depicted a more deeply textured and less uniform lifestyle dependent on manual, not machine, labor.
Though in some ways I have sympathy with the French Realists I cannot deny that their worldview doesn’t quite fit in with America as it is now. Part of the issue is that Americans in the late 20th Century moved away from a country lifestyle to that of a city lifestyle. Family farms were sold off to developers of shopping malls or suburban homes and people worked for companies. As the nation became a service economy, shifting away from a manufacturing based economy, people stopped working with their hands. With more leisure time, people sought out new forms of entertainment. The country became enamored with ever changing popular ephemera and was less interested in the solemnity of paintings of peasant farmers.
In summation, by breaking with art derived from a French Realist tradition, Warhol filled the void with: subjective selection (not objectivity and empiricism), consumerism and awe for the symbolically glamorous (not socialism and sympathy with individual peasants) and a machine-made aesthetic (not hand-made). This was a shift from what an individual’s eye could see about the natural world to what the advertiser’s camera caught about the merchandizing world.
As we continue to live in a Warholian world it is not easy to see how the old world sentiments could reappear in painting without looking like kitsch art, sentimental romanticism or insubstantial decoration. This is the difficult problem that traditionally minded representational artists of today must confront.
It is interesting to note that Warhol was a lifelong Catholic, attending Mass several times a week. However, religious subjects and themes rarely made it into his art because he felt that his religious life should remain private. Given Warhol’s influence it is fun to speculate on how the art world would be different (and what representational artists would have inherited) if he created and publicly released religious art throughout his career.
An interesting exhibition of his more than 60 Last Supper images was on display from 1999-2001 at the Guggenheim Museum Soho. You may read more about it here: http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/warhol/