Andy-Mania Is Alive and Well in New York

Andy would have loved it. He would have loved the big yellow banner luffing in the cold outside the Museum of Modern Art announcing “Andy Warhol, A Retrospective.” First since 1971. First since his death in 1987.

Still famous after all these years.

He would have loved the fact that--even before the 300-work survey opened to the public today--a record 10,000 fans turned out for members’ previews, the press opening drew 500 journalists, and the museum was inundated with requests from network television, which usually treats art shows the way headwaiters treat panhandlers. Even MTV came. Steve Martin and Paul Simon were seen among the usual art world luminaries.

The milk-pale little man with the silver wig snapped to his forehead would have been shyly thrilled that the exhibition will travel to Chicago, London, Cologne, Milan and Paris after it closes here May 2. Since he worshiped the movies, he might have been a bit disappointed that his show--including a dozen of his underground films--will not come to Los Angeles. Well, so are we. He had his first solo show at La Cienega’s old Ferus Gallery.

Maybe, however, he would have brightened again at the serious and aesthetically dignified way his oeuvre is presented by curator Kynaston McShine.

On the other hand, maybe not. After all, this is the artist who, more than any other, wedded fine art to popular culture, promoting a breakthrough rock band, publishing a gossip magazine, selling commercial endorsements and generally making his name as much of a household word as, well, Campbell’s soup.

“Warhol” became as inescapable a signature of the ‘60s as the Kennedys or the Beatles. Warhol literally forged our visual image of the decade with his deadpan, silk-screened Brillo boxes and images of glamorous sexpots repeated like so many sheets of postage stamps. He demythified the idea of the artist’s studio by calling his the Factory and remythified the notion of the bohemian loser by dubbing members of his exotic-oddball entourage “Superstars” with names like International Velvet and Candy Darling.

The Warhol that remained the boy Andrew Warhola, the frail star-struck autograph hound from Pittsburgh, thought all these besotted misfits were magic until one of them--a frenzied radical feminist named Valerie Solanas--shot him nearly to death in 1968. After that he retreated, frightened, into conventional celebrity in the fashion of his friend and longtime infatuation, Truman Capote.

Funny. In her recent Warhol memoir, “Famous for Fifteen Minutes” former superstar Ultra Violet observed that most of the Factory faithful were, like herself and Andy, fallen-away Catholics.

By the time Warhol died absurdly at 58 following a gall bladder operation, the priests of art tended to regard him as a has-been and a sellout who lived on past glory and cranked out uninspired commissioned portraits for the wealthy.

Then it was discovered that the aging street urchin who wore panty hose and schlepped a shopping bag had led a double life. The hip leather-and-mylar Phantom of the Media lived in a frumpy Victorian brownstone with his Czech mother until she died in 1972, convinced that her Andy went to Mass every Sunday. The house was chockablock with compulsive collections ranging from cookie jars to carrousel horses. When the collections went on the auction block, record prices made it clear that Andy-mania was not dead. His estate,

according to one estimate, was worth $100 million.

Warhol defined an artist as someone who markets his aura. His is so inextricably meshed with his work that it will not be simple to separate them. All the same, the impressive exhibition tends to return one to an older estimate of Warhol as an artist of the weight and magnitude of a Jackson Pollock and an artistic personality as beloved as Salvador Dali.

What exactly did Warhol accomplish? In radical contrast to the intense subjectivity of the Abstract Expressionists, he placed a mirror in front of a more public and generalized American Dream. It is the dream of the little guy sitting sopping up fantasies of wealth, glamour and fame from the newspaper, the radio and the television, constructing a world from the vulgar phantoms of the media. They seem more real than his own boring life even though utterly without substance.

The first works in the exhibition are a series of paintings based on comic strip panels--Superman, Dick Tracy and Popeye circa 1960. They tend to bear out Robert Hughes’ notion that the keys to Warhol’s sensibility are his homosexuality and his Catholicism. There is a gay campiness and nostalgia about them as well as a devotional quality of hero worship.

But their most striking quality--so far up front that we are liable to miss it for sheer obviousness--is their incredible detachment. This is the art of a man who simply and openly did not want to have feelings. He did not want to be touched or hurt or comforted when he had a bullet in his chest. Yet he told Ultra Violet that he chose Dick Tracy, Popeye and Superman because he had had sexual fantasies about them as a boy. As a man he came to long for disembodied sex, robot sex.

What it seems we should look for in Warhol’s art is a kind of oblique closeted confession, and sure enough that is what we find. A series of early black-and-white ads for water heaters, drills and the like tap into the Dadaists tactic of using mechanical objects as sexual metaphors. By the time we get to “Campbell’s Soup Can With Can Opener” we know we are dealing with an image of sadistic erotic violation.

Come on. How do we know it isn’t just a soup can? The same way we know when Warhol is making great art and when he making lousy art. His best work has a riveted intensity. The images are terse, direct and honed even when they appear to be mere silk-screen copies of photographs.

We know because Warhol evokes a surprising range of emotions for an artist who pretended not to have any. There’s a beatific sweetness in his do-it-yourself paintings of sailboats and flowers. There is terrible moral despair in the disaster paintings of suicides, race riots and bloody bodies draped across ambulances. They have the horror of a Francis Bacon, but their detachment doubles the chill. They seem to say, “Hey, man, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I see all these terrible things on the news and I just go on eating my TV dinner. Do you ever do that?”

Well, yes, we do, but we don’t own up to it. We pass by our freezing hearts like we shrug off a beggar. Warhol’s candor is disarming. He never held himself up as a model for anybody. He was an open travesty of his own creepiness and so became an Everyman for shy persons with megalomaniac longings. He liked money so he painted it. He like Del Monte Peaches so he painted them. He worshiped fame so he painted its icons tirelessly but somehow with a consciousness of them as monstrous illusion and lethal trap. His holy virgin was Marilyn Monroe on a gold background. His “Triple Elvis” is an hallucinatory masterpiece.

Toward the end of the decade we see him slipping. His rigorous selection of images gives way to journalistic disengagement and show-biz sentimentality. He paints the collector Ethel Skull 36 times from photo booth pictures, just standing back laconically letting her make a fool of herself. He paints the artist Joseph Beuys and you wonder why he has selected an artist so utterly unlike himself. The image has no resonance.

He strikes the note once again with his monumental faces of Chairman Mao, but the idea goes sour. It’s shockingly funny to present the Chinese Communist patriarch as the World’s Greatest Celebrity, but it is so profoundly dumb that it boomerangs and makes Warhol look like a twit along with a million pulp magazines.

As long as Warhol was an outsider spinning dreams of fame, glamour and wealth, he made prescient, lean-hungry art full of American-immigrant shyness, longing and alien insight.

Once he became an insider, he lost it, painting his fellow luminaries with the lugubrious chumminess of Sammy Davis Jr. on a TV spectacular. Oh, Liza, I love your eyes. Oh, Mick, I love your lips.

He performed the weary trick of putting his trademark on art history, Warholizing Pollock, Edvard Munch and even Leonardo. Picasso got away with that, not little Andy.

There is a tragic dimension to most great modern art that has to do with the fact that almost no truly creative people know exactly what they are doing. They bumble in and out of their greatness without really knowing what is special about it.

Warhol’s instincts led him to create a purgatorially realistic panorama of the vanity of a society whose paradise vision is formed by hype. His heartless naivete is a drag-queen mirror of what it portrays. In every picture he confesses he is a monstrous camera depicting a monstrous camera and in so doing issues a priestly caution that redeems him. He was an Expressionist frozen into a TV dinner.

He told the art world where it was headed and labeled the gate: “Abandon Hope.” Nobody listened.