Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again at the WHITNEY MUSEUM

[Music] [Music] Skinner sleep mistress real like a vision stances an awesome point where's the read now rose pursuit it's forgive she's good hello viewers get your half-assed eye reporter James Caan the guy on the bike but I'm not on the bike today because it's been raining cats and dogs all morning but we're here at the Whitney Museum of American Art and I'm gonna play a little game with you folks I'm not gonna say what work or what artist we're here to look at but if you don't if you don't know who this is [Music] you're gonna have to spend more time watching the calm reports and studying your art history everyone should know who this is by now since andy warhol and this is his initial series of Campbell's soup cans [Music] [Music] actually it's wonderful to see these together I think Irving Bloom was showing these at the ferris gallery in 1964 and decided that he didn't want to break up the set so I think he bought them all and she's at some point maybe a couple of years ago I think he sold this entire suite to the Whitney for 1415 million dollars cheddar cheese new great as a sauce too so the title of this show is Andy Warhol from A to B and back again which I think was title of his one of his books and I believe was curated by Donna DeSalvo the head curator here at the Whitney as I said before I'm late it was raining I was waiting for it to clear up so I could ride my bike but I had to come on the subway with an umbrella because it was raining so hard also I forgot my extra batteries so we're gonna run through here and to see how much we can get this piece is titled 192 $1 bills 1962 and this is dance lesson maybe well I got a notice for this exhibition about six months ago and although I'm a member of the museum so I could wait and come in for they'll probably have several private previews for the members at the various levels I decided I wanted to come in for this this is brillo boxes 1969 which is a version of the 1964 original these are all plywood silkscreen prints this is actually the the Warhol exhibition that arthur danto saw when he decided to come up with his new idea that art had died or we had passed beyond art because at this point he says one of the functions of art was always to imitate nature but when you had gotten to a point where you could do an imitation that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing that suddenly art became something else this is S&H Green Stamps this is where I came for is the classic wonderful early Warhol's it's acrylic on linen this is 1962 and I would estimate that this is week six by five feet coca-cola bottles well this is a huge show two floors probably I could make several hours of video this is wonderful so we've got some of his early illustrations he was well known and was an award-winning commercial artist and one of his specialties was shoe ads and shoe design he was really quite adept at his drawing although on I think he was also borrowing a lot from Ben Sean was a well-known as they called him a social realist but his jagged bloody lines I think owe a lot to him sure and oh gosh this is great so we've got reproductions of the newspapers where his ads appeared and then we've got a whole suite of his shoes with gold leaf well I guess Andy actually was very successful with his commercial design and won many awards and was making a lot of money and I think he was from Pennsylvania maybe Pittsburgh and well he spent a lot of time as a child he was sick with rheumatic fever and some things and so he spent a lot of time in bed reading movie magazines that his mother brought home okay so I don't think you'd see these in the magazines as I said I think I should probably try to hurry because there are a lot of a lot of work in the show and I'd like to get this paste it together as soon as they could as soon as I can because I'm sure it'll be a popular popular program two heads oil and spray paint and ink on canvas this is 1957 actually that's amazing and he was using spray paint and portrait of John Butler with danseur 1952 oh boy so this is the real classic Warhol stuff so this might be where he actually started doing the real pop art this is coca-cola to 1961 casein and wax crayon on linen and I'm sure for a lot of people this at this point it's already 65 years ago 60 some-odd years ago this is still shocking here's the the cleaned up version it's 1962 coca-cola three and I'd say that this is also probably about six by five feet and it's casein which is actually an interesting medium to be using on canvas like this so this is close cover before striking coca-cola 1962 acrylic graphite transfer type and sandpaper on linen oh that's great so he's little strike pad is actually sandpaper that's great American match company awesome that's press on type actually this is this is basically his same the same thing he's doing with this commercial work [Music] 129 died in June 1962 acrylic and graphite on linen Warhol painted this work entirely by hand but he wanted to reproduce the natural peculiarities of the printed process by carefully mimicking the bend a dot pattern okay so he was thinking about bend a dots and Roy Lichtenstein actually made that part of his practice that's Superman and Dick Tracy now as I understand it the whole group of pop artists Oh Warhol Lichtenstein Rosenquist Robert Indiana all of those people kind of working independently and they weren't aware of each other's ideas so I guess when this started to coalesce basically at the Sidney Janis gallery and at Leo Castelli a lot of these people thought they were out working by themselves okay so I like his newspaper headlines pirates see ship News 1961 graphite on paper and liner hijacked as I understood it that Andy approached Leo Castelli with one of his comic book paintings and at that point I think Ivan carpet brought in Roy Lichtenstein and Roy was also doing his first comic book things and the work was actually so similar that Leo said I can't do two comic book artists at the same time where is you'll rupture I actually like these because they're a little more painterly water-based paint on canvas okay this is a very famous piece before and after 1962 grillak and acrylic and graphite on canvas you know as I'm looking at this it looks like some of this might have been taped I can see the little blurbs are what I was trained to call them little tumors coming under the the tape line and there is a kind of deadpan hide the brushstrokes feel which I guess is all a harbinger of his use of the silkscreen oh boy golde Marilyn 1962 as a silkscreen not sure I think these are maybe some of the earliest of his silkscreen pieces silver Liz triptych 1963 this is also interesting because although and is dealing with the very iconic face or a figure he's also paying homage to minimalism yeah I wasn't really aware that he was dealing with those kinds of things that early silver Marlin 1963 silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen okay so I like the the open space oh don't step over the line okay so this is fun we've got three Elvis's and then it's kind of separate one at the end which again kind of won't plays with the ideas of see reality product the manufacturing of something okay this is a Warhol that will probably sell for 100 million and pains I'm as I'm looking at this I can see that now there are some brushstrokes in there so he's painting the the colors in [Music] it's another iconic image that ambi went back to again and again 30 are better than one 1963 silkscreen on linen and I think one of the things I like about the silkscreen work is that although this is a kind of mechanical reproduction there's a lot of handwork there's still the the degrading of the image of the screams are getting clogged up there are variations in how much ink you squeegee over the surface so there's still a sense of the a painter's hand okay somebody's doing that interview we won't infringe I think Andy was also one of the first artists that got into the whole idea of the selfie I guess this is part of his ten most wanted series and I'm not sure but I think that he produced a lot of these for the 1967 World's Fair the American Pavilion out in Queens and as a lot of people didn't appreciate this and yeah here again we're dealing with the vendee dots and people like Sigma polka started using the the dots [Music] these are 1964 most of these are probably about four and a half by four feet eateth skull thirty-six times okay so we're talking mid to late 60s at this point and Andy was probably one of the best-known artists in the world and certainly the most known artists in New York I think this or is this disaster series and so I've got her tuna fish disaster 1963 silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen and while Andy has bumped up his scale I think there was a whole aggressive push to displace the the Abstract Expressionists who had been kind of running ruling the roost for about 20 years by the mid 60's and if I'm not mistaken this is a young lady who had committed suicide and is embedded in the top of a car so I think Andy wanted to use the same scale trying to get the same kind of impact as the abstract expressions and I think he really had a great color sense this is another disaster a car crash some of somebody wrote him a letter and said all your coca-cola bottles and so on are too Pleasant that you need to deal with the more the the tragic side of things and how would Andy deal with that he would go out and scan the newspapers and find some of the most disturbing images he could also I think that uh yeah he really was a master of the media thinking about how to use media how media affects our concept of reality lavender disaster 1963 I would say that these pieces are probably about 12 by 8 something like that I'm gonna keep moving [Music] 9 Jackie's 1964 now I'm not sure but I think one of these photographs were the subject of a copyright lawsuit that Andy had borrowed this from some newspaper or magazine ad precursor to people like jeff koons and richard prince he got he got sued and I'm not sure how the case came out but and we still got the paintings here [Music] crowd actually I've never seen this before okay so he's got our cow wallpaper [Music] oh this is a very interesting installation [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so this is the period when a lot of people were [Music] criticizing Andy for being too - gorgeous too pretty to vacuous - vacant [Music] and okay we'll look at this and compare this to the Seneca Campbell's soup cans [Music] it's great you can I pick your flowers you can have them whatever size you want it could be 12 by 12 24 24 36 by 36 these are probably about 7 foot squares you can have them whatever color you want you want a black and white you want red and pink yellow and green magenta and chartreuse and he was also big on the multiples I guess be working with silkscreen as your means of our production or or painting that it's natural to start doing multiples of these but oh gosh you can see that he is was really a master of color self-portrait 1966 you know in some of these images he went back to dozens of times maybe hundreds of times sometimes he would blow them up shrink them down multiply them flip them from left to right these are big electric chairs 1967-68 [Music] and Andy also had a whole factory of people cranking out his stuff we got a chairman mao wallpaper and he was also a be a breakthrough independent filmmaker [Music] and I think he may have made dozens maybe hundreds of films and had screen tests of basically all of the movers and shakers in the New York art scene and a lot of other interesting people and due to his early interest in things like the fashion magazines and the movie magazines there's his mother at Bratton home that he was really a fan now I remember seeing this portrait of Chairman Mao at the old Whitney up on Madison Avenue about oh gosh 30 years ago this piece has got to be about 20 feet tall and they were saying that this is the first major Warhol retrospective in 25 years something like that [Music] well I appreciate looking at these and seeing how an image like this we talk about something degrading as you print it time after time after time but also as you start to blow it up it takes on a different character I knew this was also about the same time that Andy decided that he wanted to be a little more painterly and started splashing some some paint in there on the under levels and then would screen over the top and some people gave him a hard time about that but it was also kind of a movement that was coming in response to minimalism conceptualism and a lot of European artists were also trying to reintroduce a more expressive less minimal or conceptual feel to their work it's a ephemera this is interesting [Music] self-portraits in drag 1982 82 I actually bumped into Andy a couple times [Music] so remember this was this skull show I remember seeing him at a show called shadows and he gave me a copy of Interview magazine and signed it I still have it [Music] [Applause] and here are some examples of and in jean-michel basquiat collaboration so this was this was all happening when I was a young struggling starving artist in the East Village was taking off I guess the the story the myth the the legend is that Jean Michel Basquiat had left home with like the age of 15 or 16 and was floating around in Manhattan and one of the ways he would make money is that he would make these handmade postcards and he would be running around and what at the time was kind of the Nuart neighborhood which was Soho and at some point he ended up bumping into Andy and I guess Andy bought a handful of his cards and as jean-michele started to become more popular and get some critical attention they somehow hooked up and started making collaborative works and as I said Andy was very very hip about dealing with the media and how you could keep your name out there on the front page now as I said I I bumped into Andy once or twice I would see him around [Music] Union Square I used to work at the Utrecht art supply store there and and he moved his factory down to Union Square that was where he was shot in 1968 okay so ladies and gentlemen I'm gonna have time to read okay but we can say that I think easier ladies and drag but you can see is one you get in there with the paintbrush and slide some pain around he was actually I think a very good very good colorist when he wanted to be somebody was joking about him wanting to bring in elements of Picasso and Matisse and I was looking at this kind of thinking okay so we've got there's a famous Matisse portrait of the green stripe it's got a green shadow the runs down the middle of this lady's face or even a lot of Picasso where he splits up the straight-ahead and the profile faces and kind of lays them all over each other [Music] all right so we got the hammer and sickle pieces here [Music] probably about six by seven feet [Music] one of the questions I always had was there was always the theory that at least as far as the market goes that rarity would add to the value of a particular object so if if you were doing a painting and you were considered a master if he only did one or two or three or four paintings a year that would make them more valuable and if you did a hundred paintings a year they would be somehow less valuable and Andy somehow played it from the opposite side so a lot of these works we're literally produced by the dozens in various versions [Music] this is I'm certainly gonna 22-caliber revolve around Sentinel [Music] [Music] okay this is very famous as I said the quintessential selfie guy okay so I think these are some of the some of the shadows maybe and shadows diamond dust 1979 so I I remember meeting him at the the exhibition of this body of work [Music] think of if there was one thing that Andy did know he knew how to uh make attractive things and when I think about people like Jeff Coons are damien hirst and their use of shiny surfaces or fake gems I know that they were looking and thinking a lot about Warhol and strangely Warhol got a lot of criticism for his as the coolness the mechanical reproduction the work being manufactured in a factory I believe he died in 1986 so at this point that's 30-some odd years ago looking back on this now one of this looks pretty pretty raw pretty pana Lee and [Music] in comparison to it jeff koons and a lot of the pictures generation people I think Andy was more of a hands-on human kind of painter this is one of his piss paintings see what they call us the oxidation paintings gold metallic pigment and urine on linen I guess that he discovered that you could get the metallic pigments to oxidize if you put the right kinds of chemicals on there so he did a whole series of these I guess with various kinds of metallic paint and then I guess would invite his friends up to drink urinate on the canvases Oh somebody's got some talent here we got a little starburst in here yeah the whole idea of urination has a long history especially with the the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock has a famous story regarding that well they're billing this as the the abstract gallery and talking about how and he actually did experiment with abstraction so I don't know what the title of this is but as you can see there's a large overlaying screen of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci and then he's got a camouflage pattern behind [Music] there's another aspect about Warhol that I find intriguing and that was that a lot of people would try to interview him and he would come off as kind of some kind of simple-minded no goof and but I think that was all a ploy and [Music] in many ways especially when you start to look at his work you realized that he was constantly moving constantly having new ideas it's in one of his Rorschach test paintings now I'm actually looking at this and thinking this is probably about 20 feet tall so he had to blow pour the paint down there and then fold it over like it was a little sheet of paper and then unfolded yeah so I can see where you would need to have a couple of people at least helping you manipulate manipulate something like that okay so this is like a huge Monalisa [Music] begin so we've got a lot more [Music] pain early incidents having up happening on here than what you might expect let's see if we can get some stuff from the third floor [Music] [Music] my name is Sandi world and I just finished eating a hamburger Oh New York [Music] well this is more like the the technology pod part of the exhibition so we've got some of Andy's prints this Ronald Reagan doing a van using commercial and no uncertain ways there is a question of how does this actually differ from a real commercial is there some kind of cynical critique of late capitalism going on here and we've got a whole line of videos I'm not gonna have time each one of these probably lasts about 20 minutes Robert long ago well which brings up the interesting point of all of the art movements artists various things that have happened in New York since Warhol broke on the scene and how they have changed shaped manipulated our cultural ideology and our consciousness of the world it's a great selection of Chairman Mao portraits [Music] okay so I've got it looks like an embossed silkscreen and then looks like he's had it inside squiggles with the magic marker or something we're gonna go down to the lobby gallery and look at his portraits okay that's cool so they're inflating a bunch of Andy Warhol silver balloons [Music] now we're gonna look at some of his portraits [Music] well see if we can come up with some of the names I know there's Dennis Hopper it's looking at an Orson Welles movie the other side of the wind last night and Dennis popped up there and the Guild's are one of his cronies so let's get some interviews where Henry kind of plays this straight man Ilyana son ivan ivan Kyra this might be Andy's mom and again it's interesting this is the period when he was trying to bring into some handwork some painting so we've got our split faces it's Leo Castelli right next to Mick Jagger and Roy Lichtenstein on the Shah of Iran Mohammed Ali oh gosh I love that altar bull that a little else in there now as I understand after Andy was shot by Valerie Solanas I guess that would be 60 68 69 liza minnelli a lot of people say he changed and decided he wanted to make the big bucks and one of the fastest ways for him to make the money Truman Capote was to do the portraits and Ivan had a friend that went down to met him at the factory and he proposed doing her portrait I don't know what the rate at that point was something like 20 grand oh that's a nice Joseph boys with the diamond dust Francisca Clemente I guess what would be interesting would be to see him how many of these people came back and had second and third and fourth portraits done [Music] this is Michelle Michelle Basquiat with oxidation huh I wonder if it's shell Michelle's fluids that are oxidizing that keep carrying him one to boast 1983 kennelly guest this is actually interesting because he's gone in and done silkscreen the eyes in a different color Robert Mapplethorpe because a lot of these people also ended up on the cover of Interview magazine Stephen Straus Kenny and Xena Schaaf I'm not sure but I think you can go to some pop-up store in the West Village and they're now collaborating and selling clothing Michael Chao pattern she ran the pattern gallery a lot of ways was one of the biggest movers and shakers in the East Village more of the scharff's Oh so now he's gotten into kind of a hard-edged abstract style heron Douglas Kramer one of his big collectors oh my god on bachelor picking his nose I like Don against his interesting is kind of a double exposure the later Rita Franklin Armand Peter Haley a lot of these people are art world stars [Music] Debbie Harry [Music] well getting the signal that my battery has ran out so this has been James comm reporting on and you are hall from a to being back again this first retrospective in New York a couple of decades here at the Whitney Museum you can like this share recommend it to friends you can subscribe you give your comments ideas suggestions below but please thank you [Music] well that was great green made my night what's your name daddy God Danny gone Giovanni yeah Danny gone gone gone solid God all right Thank You Danny God

Channel: jameskalm

Views: 26,936

Keywords: James Kalm, Andy Warhol, Danny Gone, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum, painting, drawing, sculpture, Pop Art, Neo-Expressionism, conceptual art, conceptual painting

Id: l_loodakVuE

Length: 56min 5sec (3365 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018