Musings

We have been watching (in installments) a documentary on Andy Warhol over the past few nights. It's from the PBS American Masters series — quite good, I recommend it. When T picked it up at the video store, I sniffed with disdain, in part at its four-hour running time. More significantly, however, I have just never been an admirer of Warhol or of his work, or at least the parts of it with which I was familiar. T, on the other hand, is a huge fan ever since attending a large exhibit of Warhol's work some years ago; T has frequently cited this in-person exposure to the overwhelming collectivity and scale of Warhol's original work (rather than reproductions in books and magazines) as being key to appreciating the man, and he repeated this dictum at the video store in response to my apathy. I retorted with some pique that an artist should not require that we view their œuvre in person in order to appreciate their greatness.

The documentary served me up a modest slice of humble pie, however. Warhol's early commercial illustrations (mostly of shoes for fashion mags) are really quite wonderful, as well as his more private drawings of dreamy young men in the all-together. His inked line demonstrates, as the documentary discusses, a mastery of the blotting technique — a nice trick that creates a "printed" effect at once clumsy and delicate — but what the documentary doesn't talk about is the "continuously drawn" effect of the line in his figurative work, reminiscent of Cocteau and even Schiele. It's a technique (also called "blind drawing") that I've always loved but haven't had much success with personally: drawing without removing your eyes from the subject, in other words, not looking down at the page. Of course, the truth is that the great practitioners of this technique probably did look down at the page quite a bit, but their genius is in leaving the impression that their drawings occurred in one breathless unstoppable line, as if the act of creation were reduced to the pen and the subject, with the artist subsumed into one or the other.

But I declined a second helping of pie. Warhol was a fairly cold-blooded character — not that this should affect at all our appreciation of his work and, indeed, it was to an extent this aspect of his vision that made for his early Pop Art successes — but sooner or later, I think, this quality began to overwhelm his art. The celebrity portraits become repetitive, ditto the consumerist works, and the film work seems sort of lazy — a laconic quality that feels generally true of all his work from the mid-sixties on, as if once he had obtained fame, he realized he need do only the barest minimum to maintain it.

The commentators in the documentary wax eloquent about his extraordinary grasp of ideas — but these are their ideas, not Warhol's. Sure, Warhol provided an œuvre po-faced enough to support the projection of all sorts of ideas, but is this artistic genius or simply a gift for deadpan? And must I really be an art scholar to be elevated by his work? I don't know. One critic spoke of him as a sort of seer, predicting the furture of celebrity culture — but I don't know that Andy so much predicted it as perpetuated it. And from our vantage point in history, is this really something worth celebrating?