A plethora of associations comes to mind upon mentioning legendary American artist Andy Warhol: radical arbiter of pop culture, hyper-saturated portraits of Marilyn Monroe, iconic Campbell’s soup can paintings and his quote, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Warhol and his work have certainly not been as evanescent and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is a veritable testament to his enduring artistic legacies. As the largest museum in the US dedicated to a single artist, it seeks to represent the multifaceted artist through multiple modes, arguably much in the manner of the artist himself.
Given Warhol’s special relationship with Pittsburgh, having been born, raised and educated there before moving to New York City to work in commercial advertising, the museum is particular about carefully preserving and continuing his legacy.
“Our museum’s mission is to carry on Andy Warhol’s legacy — educate about his life, promote his work world over and make new people aware of his work. We perceive ourselves as a world-keeper of his legacy,” says Eric C. Shiner, director of the museum.
Describing Warhol as constantly innovating and being ahead of the curve, Shiner says the artist took delight in embracing new techniques, dramatically pushing the envelope.
“To put it simply, he thought out of the box — and his creative explorations really opened the door to other artists who would subsequently enjoy the complete freedom to experiment and discover,” Shiner says, adding that Warhol’s prodigious and varied output set an incredible precedent for future generations of artists. And indeed, the museum amply reflects Warhol’s indefatigable desire to reassign meaning to art, its values and the rules shaping its production: illustrations, paintings, installation art and video art are just some of the artistic terrains which he explored and colonised with his presence.
So who was Andy Warhol? Born to immigrants Andrej Warhola and Julia Zavacky on August 6, 1928, Warhol’s early encounters with art occurred via his mother, who took an active role in encouraging his love for drawing, painting, cutting designs from paper, and reading.
A skilled student and lover of comics and magazines starting in fourth grade, he took free classes in studio art and art appreciation at the nearby Carnegie Institute for four years before eventually graduating from the Carnegie College of Fine Arts.
The intersection of his growing-up years with working-class Pittsburgh and glitzy, fantastical New York would thus fundamentally shape his work.
Akin to the bold, dramatic nature of his work, it is potentially easy to reduce Warhol’s oeuvre to a few landmark productions. Shiner says the museum is therefore intent on ensuring that they narrate the entire story, including his early and teenage years, and how that contributed towards making him the much vaunted icon of pop-culture.
“It’s important to convey the entire decade of the 1950s and his experiences in illustration and commercial advertising in New York City and how they influenced and shaped his work,” he says.
He refers to the iconic Campbell’s soup can paintings, saying that critiques often mention them as being simply soup cans that anyone could reproduce as art. “However, the point is that only one person did and that was Andy Warhol. What is an especially significant story in itself is how Andy Warhol came to do so — and once you know the story, as in his background and relationship with marketing/commercial advertising, you can trace the entire journey, as in how he took a seemingly mundane consumer product and elevated it into art,” Shiner said, adding that they are in the process of putting the gallery in chronological order to give as complete a narration of Warhol’s life as possible.
The decision to chronologically present Warhol’s work is appropriate given that critic Robert Rosenblum describes Warhol’s art as a “March of Time” newsreel: “An abbreviated visual anthology of the most conspicuous headlines, personalities, mythic creatures, edibles, tragedies, artworks, even ecological problems of recent decades ... his work provides an instantly intelligible chronicle of what mattered most to most people, from the suicide of Marilyn Monroe to the ascendancy of Red China ...”
Shiner agrees, and the museum too is focused upon reflecting that aspect of Warhol — who was as much an artist as a social commentator, dedicated to observing and documenting American society at the time.
The museum, therefore, has in its collection Warhol’s work from all periods, including those from his student days in the 1940s, 1950s drawings, commercial illustrations and sketchbooks, 1960s pop paintings of consumer products (“Campbell’s Soup Cans”), paintings of celebrities (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Elvis), depictions of disasters and electric chairs; portrait paintings (Mao), skull paintings and the abstract oxidations from the 1970s, and works from the 1980s such as “The Last Supper”, “Raphael I-6.99” and collaborative paintings made with younger artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente.
The sheer number of the works — 900 paintings, 100 sculptures, nearly 2,000 works on paper, 1,000 published and unique prints, and 4,000 photographs —combined with the depth and breadth of his creative journeys solidly reflects Warhol’s genius.
Video art has now become a playground of experimentation for many contemporary artists and Warhol was among the first ones to exploit its creative potential following his first encounter with a video camera in 1965. One gets a glimpse of his cinematic narratives and portraiture and his quest to portray the subject through film.
“The ‘Screen Tests’ were the most indicative extension of his portraiture, portraits coming to life, so to speak,” Shiner says, adding that Warhol was always thinking about how to challenge the Hollywood narrative, indeed, take away the notion of narratives.
“We have an immense body of his work — 60 feature films, 200 ‘Screen Tests’ and more than 4,000 videos — and given that we are only playing 20 videos at a time, we have much still waiting to be revealed,” he says. Shiner and his team are working on establishing a new media lab-lounge, which will give the feeling of being in a living room and watching videos on demand.
The changes that Shiner mentions are part of a larger plan and approach to altering format vis-à-vis how the audience engages with the museum and Warhol’s work. “People should have as much access as possible to his work,” he says, noting that many teenagers and college students think Andy Warhol is cool and relevant, identifying with his outsider revolutionary status. “He is very much the idol of all teenagers.”
The fact that he remains as hip and contemporary as ever was seen in a recently held exhibition at the museum, “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years”, which featured 145 works of arts, including paintings, sculptures, photographs and films by artists such as Alex Katz, Cindy Sherman and Takashi Murakami; these artists reinterpreted and reacted to Warhol’s groundbreaking work.
These works were juxtaposed with prime examples of paintings, sculptures and films by Warhol, enabling the viewer to take in the artist’s work in a fresh context, with respect to his successors. The show created an epic poem of art spanning generations while independently perceiving both Warhol and featured artists’ work and appreciating the unique energies.
“It was undoubtedly an unprecedented exhibition — never before had such a world-class collection of masterpieces by leading contemporary artists of the past five decades been assembled here and we were delighted to share these amazing works with our visitors,” Shiner says, elaborating that it was also exciting to demonstrate Warhol’s vast influence on these artists and their work and to anoint him as the bellwether of the contemporary art world through the way they referenced, critiqued and celebrated Warhol in their works.
“We collaborated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art for this project and it was both an honour and thrill to work with such a venerable institution,” says Shiner, who was the curator of the exhibition at the Warhol Museum.
“When people walk away from the museum, they should have a fuller understanding of what Andy Warhol was all about,” he says.
And indeed, much in the manner of the artist and whose work it represents, the museum strives to have fun and to liberate itself from the notion of a typical museum. “We are a living, breathing organism and we strive to balance both the educational and fun elements,” Shiner says.
The museum, he adds, is ever-changing, constantly redefining itself in relationship to contemporary life using its unique collections and dynamic interactive programming as tools.
Priyanka Sacheti is an independent writer based in Pittsburgh, USA.
