O.C. ART REVIEW : A Warhol Christmas: Cliched but Clever

If somebody found a bunch of shopping lists with doodles by Andy Warhol, you can bet they’d be snapped up by some salivating collector and grandly exhibited in a burst of fulsome PR. So it isn’t surprising that the Center for Decorative Arts in San Juan Capistrano is making a fuss over a set of Christmas cards Warhol made for Tiffany & Co. in the early 1960s, on view through Dec. 23.

Actually, the seemingly low-key, ultratraditional designs for the cards reflect some of the central concerns of Warhol’s own work. He was, after all, the artist who deliberately sought out such banal or well-known subjects as Campbell Soup cans, Brillo boxes and the faces of Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. He presented these subjects as mindlessly repetitive, identical images suited to an era of mass media, mass production and mass ennui.

The cards, which Warhol designed while he still worked as a commercial artist, offer images of fruit baskets, Christmas trees with birds and baubles, kids holding hands, a sled filled with presents--the most uncreative and cliched subjects imaginable.

Of course, these subjects were likely to please the average card-buyer looking for something pretty and seasonal. A major consumer in his own right (as posthumous auctions of his bric-a-brac made clear), Warhol always had a brilliant grasp of consumer habits.

The watercolor originals are cheerily executed in the unsettling colors (avocado greens, hot pinks) stylish in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. They also are full of Warhol-style repetitive imagery: To make the trio of holly leaf, fern leaf and mistletoe Christmas trees that appeared on a card from about 1963 (precise dates apparently are unavailable) Warhol repeated the same four-branch segment over and over. The eye reads the juxtaposed branches as a tree, although the branches aren’t actually connected to each other.

Other images, such as the two designs of Christmas trees made with little stars, seem to have been hand-stamped onto the paper--a primitive form of mechanical reproduction. (“Christmas Tree With Continuing Stars” is actually a fine little conceptual exercise. The whole paper is dotted with colorful stars which “fall” like snow, except where they are printed in close, overlapping formation to form the outline of a tree. Warhol’s penciled-in triangular guidelines are visible under the mass of stars.)

In 1962 Warhol pioneered the concept of having his “paintings” silk-screened by assistants rather than painted by (his) hand. So making designs for mass-produced cards was right up his alley.

Even the fact that they were made to be sold by a ritzy Fifth Avenue jewelry store probably suited him to a T. As others have pointed out, Warhol’s art was the reflection of an affluent society. Wealthy people shelled out more for Warhol’s screen-printed portraits of themselves than they would have paid for ordinary, painstakingly hand-painted portraits.

So, far from merely being a hungry artist’s potboilers or curiously banal mementoes of a world-beating career, the cards are full-fledged pieces of Warholiana. And it just so happens that Tiffany’s is reissuing two cards each year beginning this Christmas--a savvy move in an era that once again is likely to ooh and ah over the sweetly traditional motifs. But we know better.

Fourteen Christmas card drawings by Andy Warhol are at the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts through Dec. 23, along with Christmas trees decorated by 10 designers. The center, at 31431 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. A $3 donation is requested. Information: (714) 496-2132.