next to of course god america ....
When the Whitney Museum of American Art moved from Madison Avenue to the heart of the meatpacking district, its inaugural exhibition was a survey of its monumental collection, in other words, a survey of American Art. It was named, not a little ironically, "America is Hard to See". As I moved from room to room and from one floor to another looking at all the famous and beloved works, I kept thinking about how much they owed to Europe. Cadmus - to early Renaissance, Calder- unabashedly to Paris, Hopper - in his eerie silence - to de Chirico.
The last work in the last room of the pre-War and WWII-era art was George Grosz' "The Painter of the Hole", an image of an artist, seated at his easel among smoking ruins of the bombed-out Europe, painting endless versions of the hole that Europe has become.
In the very next room you were face-to-face with the enormous canvases of the Abstract Expressionists: big, bold, macho and muscular, loud and brash, they were not simply innovative: they discarded Europe as a bombed-out hole. It was once said of Frank Sinatra: he is cocksure, like America. In these big canvases America was not hard to see, or rather, it was not hard to see how America saw itself in all its post-War glory, a brave new world, a land of the free, a home of the brave. Cocksure, pun intended.
Last month I was at the Whitney to see Warhol's retrospective, an exhibition that was, once again, sprawling onto several floors.
FIrst, there were his art school drawings: mostly rather unflattering portraits of people, including that of a boy picking his nose. I would call this period, the German period. Everything - the jagged lines, the format, the subject matter attest to that.
But once Andy is out of school and starts his brilliant career as a commercial illustrator, his style undergoes an amazing transformation. He is now working in pen and ink, his lines are curvy, elegant, and his works are witty and effervescent. I would call that period French. If his art school work is informed by Grosz, his first years as a professional artist owe much more to Cocteau, both in his commissioned work and in his private portraits of friends and lovers, homoerotic elements included.
By 1961 Andy Warhol was successful and part of a glittering New York circle, yet his work was met with disdain by the Abstract Expressionists crowd and also by the professionals in the art world. That disdain, by the way, continued well into the 1980's, yet, look who is having a Retrospective at the Whitney now.
Andy Warhol, then, painted the works that would seal his place in the Pantheon of American Art: the dollar bills and the Coca-Cola bottles. These were the first in the body of work that really saw America, not the way it wanted to see itself but the way it really was and still is. Big, loud, celebrity-crazed, obsessed with money, fascinated by disasters and gore, brash, crass, corny, consumerist. But, also, beautiful, because Andy understood the power of beauty more than almost all of his contemporaries. And democratic.
This is what he wrote about that icon, "Green Coca-Cola Bottles":
“What’s grand about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest... you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one bum on the corner is drinking.”
The last work in the last room of the pre-War and WWII-era art was George Grosz' "The Painter of the Hole", an image of an artist, seated at his easel among smoking ruins of the bombed-out Europe, painting endless versions of the hole that Europe has become.
In the very next room you were face-to-face with the enormous canvases of the Abstract Expressionists: big, bold, macho and muscular, loud and brash, they were not simply innovative: they discarded Europe as a bombed-out hole. It was once said of Frank Sinatra: he is cocksure, like America. In these big canvases America was not hard to see, or rather, it was not hard to see how America saw itself in all its post-War glory, a brave new world, a land of the free, a home of the brave. Cocksure, pun intended.
Last month I was at the Whitney to see Warhol's retrospective, an exhibition that was, once again, sprawling onto several floors.
FIrst, there were his art school drawings: mostly rather unflattering portraits of people, including that of a boy picking his nose. I would call this period, the German period. Everything - the jagged lines, the format, the subject matter attest to that.
But once Andy is out of school and starts his brilliant career as a commercial illustrator, his style undergoes an amazing transformation. He is now working in pen and ink, his lines are curvy, elegant, and his works are witty and effervescent. I would call that period French. If his art school work is informed by Grosz, his first years as a professional artist owe much more to Cocteau, both in his commissioned work and in his private portraits of friends and lovers, homoerotic elements included.
By 1961 Andy Warhol was successful and part of a glittering New York circle, yet his work was met with disdain by the Abstract Expressionists crowd and also by the professionals in the art world. That disdain, by the way, continued well into the 1980's, yet, look who is having a Retrospective at the Whitney now.
Andy Warhol, then, painted the works that would seal his place in the Pantheon of American Art: the dollar bills and the Coca-Cola bottles. These were the first in the body of work that really saw America, not the way it wanted to see itself but the way it really was and still is. Big, loud, celebrity-crazed, obsessed with money, fascinated by disasters and gore, brash, crass, corny, consumerist. But, also, beautiful, because Andy understood the power of beauty more than almost all of his contemporaries. And democratic.
This is what he wrote about that icon, "Green Coca-Cola Bottles":
“What’s grand about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest... you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one bum on the corner is drinking.”