ART CITIES: Paris-Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s work encapsulates the 1960s through the 1980s in New York. By imitating the familiar aesthetics of mass media, advertising, and celebrity culture, Warhol blurred the boundaries between his work and the world that inspired it, producing images that have become as pervasive as their sources. Much debate still surrounds the iconic screenprinted images with which Warhol established his reputation as a Pop artist in the early 1960s.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

In the exhibition “Silver Screen” are on show three early paintings by Andy Warhol from 1963. In in the summer of 1963, Warhol was thinking as both painter and filmmaker, producing silkscreened canvases with multiple images. This was when he received his first camera (a 16mm Bolex that he later used for the “Screen Tests”, cinematic portraits of friends and “superstars”) and his paintings began to mirror the repetitions of filmstrips. At the same time, Warhol worked in a leaky former firehouse on the Upper East Side, eventually hiring poet Gerard Malanga to complete some of his most significant early silkscreened paintings, “Disasters”, “Silver Elvis”, and “Silver Liz”. A year later, Warhol moved to a larger space on East 47th Street. There, lighting designer turned assistant and photographer Billy Name lined the interior in foil and spray paint, creating a reflective environment for happenings, performances, films, and art production. The Silver Factory was born. By the time Warhol produced “Silver Liz”, Elizabeth Taylor had come to epitomize Hollywood glamor, but she had also been in the news for scandal and illness. This made her a perfect subject for the artist, whose silkscreen depiction of the Cleopatra star is derived from a publicity still and echoes the bold styling and square composition of his “Marilyn” silkscreens from the previous year. The canvas embodies Warhol’s intersecting absorptions in painting and the movies. “Ethel Scull 36 Times” portrays the eponymous socialite who, along with her husband Robert Scull, assembled one of the first major American collections of Pop and Minimal art. In 1963, Scull commissioned Warhol to paint her portrait; he took her to the photo booths on 42nd Street where Scull played the part of a burgeoning starlet. The portrait “Ethel Scull 36 Times” was made from her animated and lively photo booth strips. Warhol’s lesser-seen painting of Scull in silver transforms the socialite into an icon of Hollywood’s silver screen, its images’ uneven tone again suggesting the flicker of a celluloid reel. In the early 1960s, Warhol explored a darker side of American life in the middle of the century with his “Death and Disaster” series. This loosely connected group of roughly seventy artworks takes as their subjects car accidents, suicides, electric chairs, even contaminated cans of tuna fish that were reported to kill two housewives in the Detroit suburbs. Warhol avidly appropriated his source material from newspapers and police photo archives, manipulating the industrial silkscreen technique to mechanically repeat these lurid images across broad swaths of canvas. In this daring detournement, Warhol created an endlessly haunting psychological portrait of American popular culture by focusing on its morbid fascination with violence and tragedy. In “Tunafish Disaster”, Warhol focuses on two women made famous by the uncanniness of their deaths caused by cans of contaminated tuna. In eleven paintings derived from the same source, Warhol used a Newsweek article from 1963 that paired the victims’ photographs with a grim headline. As part of the “Death and Disaster” series, these works comment on the numbing effect of gruesome images in the media. “Tunafish Disaster”, however, is unusual in that the article headline and women’s faces are featured prominently, tying the work to a specific story while highlighting the commonality of ordinary people being thrust into the public eye during times of crisis or in death. In all three works on view in Paris, Warhol presents a layered view of the promise and perils of fame.

Photo: Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull, 1963 Silkscreen ink and spray paint on linen, 83 ¼ × 134 ½ inches (211.5 × 341.6 cm), © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, France, Duration: 1/6-31/8/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:00, https://gagosian.com/