((PKG)) ANDY WARHOL
((Banner: The Arts; All of Warhol))
((Reporter/Camera: Genia Dulot))
((Map: San Francisco, California))
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art))
Most people think of a Warhol as a pop artist: light-hearted, about
consumer goods, Coca-Cola, some Campbell Soup, a Brillo box.
That was a tiny, tiny brief chapter in Warhol’s career, because
immediately, the next year, the idea of death, of mortality enters
his work.
Warhol came from a very poor working class family. They were
immigrants from a far east part of Slovakia. They were Byzantine
Catholics, and the icon, you know, the image of Virgin on the gold
ground, was something that Warhol grew up with.
In 1962, he decided to do a picture of Marilyn Monroe, and I think
he treated her as an icon. He did many images of Marilyn,
sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, or silver, but it
was always the same image. So that Marilyn was a timeless
goddess. She was immortal.
Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor was someone of our
world, earthly, that she was mortal. And so, he starts with her as
a young woman, and in this painting, you see at very top, a very
photographic, almost, kind of image. And it flickers across this
large canvas, sometimes fading, sometimes being saturated, and
by the time you get to the bottom of the canvas of the far edge,
she is almost completely disappeared and faded away. And I
think this is a kind of metaphor for mortality, that we, in the bloom
of youth, we also see the beginnings of a life and death.
Warhol was not just a simple reflection of the culture. He was
critically responding to the culture and to the existential issues of
human life, which are always with us. We can never avoid the
issues of life and death. And, I think, that’s part of the reason that
Warhol is such a profound artist and why he is so relevant today.
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art))
So, here we are looking at a portrait of a woman named Ethell
Scull. Andy took her to Times Square, and told her to be happy,
be sad, be pensive, be flamboyant, and then assembled a group
of these portraits by silk screening them on canvas with different
colored grounds and made a multiple portrait of Ethel Scull. So,
Ethel would be just as famous as Marilyn or Liz.
And I think this is the birth of our culture that we are immersed in
right now, the obsession with the selfie, with the Instagram, with
creating an identity out of the image of one’s self.
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art))
Well, we are standing in front of the series that Warhol did in 1964
called “The Most Wanted Men.” And these come from a New
York police bulletin of criminals that the police felt were the most
important to try to catch, you know, to put in jail, that they were
the most dangerous ones. So, I think by making “The Most
Wanted Men” from the police bulletin, the subject was sort of the
counterpoint, or a, kind of, metaphor for his own identity as a gay
man, that he was a criminal, that he was an outsider. So, the idea
of, again, identity is a very profound, fundamental issue in
Warhol’s work. And again, he was far ahead of our time, that we
are only catching up to now, that the issue about sexual identity is
unstable, it could be fluid, and what was once illegal, what was
outside the law, has now been actually embraced by society, that
that’s one of the revolutions of our time.
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Banner: The Arts; All of Warhol))
((Reporter/Camera: Genia Dulot))
((Map: San Francisco, California))
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art))
Most people think of a Warhol as a pop artist: light-hearted, about
consumer goods, Coca-Cola, some Campbell Soup, a Brillo box.
That was a tiny, tiny brief chapter in Warhol’s career, because
immediately, the next year, the idea of death, of mortality enters
his work.
Warhol came from a very poor working class family. They were
immigrants from a far east part of Slovakia. They were Byzantine
Catholics, and the icon, you know, the image of Virgin on the gold
ground, was something that Warhol grew up with.
In 1962, he decided to do a picture of Marilyn Monroe, and I think
he treated her as an icon. He did many images of Marilyn,
sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, or silver, but it
was always the same image. So that Marilyn was a timeless
goddess. She was immortal.
Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor was someone of our
world, earthly, that she was mortal. And so, he starts with her as
a young woman, and in this painting, you see at very top, a very
photographic, almost, kind of image. And it flickers across this
large canvas, sometimes fading, sometimes being saturated, and
by the time you get to the bottom of the canvas of the far edge,
she is almost completely disappeared and faded away. And I
think this is a kind of metaphor for mortality, that we, in the bloom
of youth, we also see the beginnings of a life and death.
Warhol was not just a simple reflection of the culture. He was
critically responding to the culture and to the existential issues of
human life, which are always with us. We can never avoid the
issues of life and death. And, I think, that’s part of the reason that
Warhol is such a profound artist and why he is so relevant today.
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art))
So, here we are looking at a portrait of a woman named Ethell
Scull. Andy took her to Times Square, and told her to be happy,
be sad, be pensive, be flamboyant, and then assembled a group
of these portraits by silk screening them on canvas with different
colored grounds and made a multiple portrait of Ethel Scull. So,
Ethel would be just as famous as Marilyn or Liz.
And I think this is the birth of our culture that we are immersed in
right now, the obsession with the selfie, with the Instagram, with
creating an identity out of the image of one’s self.
((NATS – Exhibit))
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art))
Well, we are standing in front of the series that Warhol did in 1964
called “The Most Wanted Men.” And these come from a New
York police bulletin of criminals that the police felt were the most
important to try to catch, you know, to put in jail, that they were
the most dangerous ones. So, I think by making “The Most
Wanted Men” from the police bulletin, the subject was sort of the
counterpoint, or a, kind of, metaphor for his own identity as a gay
man, that he was a criminal, that he was an outsider. So, the idea
of, again, identity is a very profound, fundamental issue in
Warhol’s work. And again, he was far ahead of our time, that we
are only catching up to now, that the issue about sexual identity is
unstable, it could be fluid, and what was once illegal, what was
outside the law, has now been actually embraced by society, that
that’s one of the revolutions of our time.
((NATS – Exhibit))
