Samples - From The Ink
WARHOL dreams America
So much has been written about Andy Warhol that is hard to say anything new. His images of Campbell's soup cans and various celebrities have been so burned into our collective memory bank that we might almost feel no need to go see the stunning traveling exhibition currently showing at the Rubin center for visual arts.
But to see these silk screen prints in person is to gain a new perspective. First of all, they are larger than one might have thought. For the most part they are around 3x 2” or 3’ by 3’, and they call out like sirens. Warhol was an extremely successful commercial artist before he burst on the fine arts scene, and his works reflect this prodigious talent.
One of Warhol’s major contributions to contemporary art was essentially to make a home for graphic art in the fine art world as well as to expand suitable subject matter. He was not alone in this, but when the prints of soup cans were first shown in a gallery there was the expected shock, outrage and gnashing of teeth. Now the fact that these works look utterly contemporary shows how much the art world has changed. What is more interesting, is that in the beginning Warhol talked about how he wanted to remove the artist’s hand from the work and other controversial ideas.
One also has the idea that he was interested in various celebrities exclusively because of their status as celebrities with little regard for who they were or what they did. He was portraying icons with a graphic eye. But while these earlier works are what made him famous, his later works, such as those in the “Shadow” series show him moving into a much more personal direction. Here he is using graphic techniques but in a different haunting way. There is the hint of trying to reveal something more about himself, and in many ways these are the much more interesting works rather than the earlier prints which were more important for how they changed our perception about what art should be than their actual representation. The show, which comes from the Jordan Schnitzer collection, is a superb retrospective of his major print portfolios through the years and it is a unique opportunity to see the work of one of the major figures who changed the 20th century art world. Andy Warhol’s Dream America: June 10-August 4 Rubin Center for Visual Arts at UTEP. mon-fri 10-5 (915) 747-6151