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Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again
at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 19 — September 2)
Reviewed by Jill Conner
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is set to open Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again, a stunning retrospective that presents the artist’s large-scale compositions, installations, portraits, sculptures and films. The title of this exhibition suggests something relational about Warhol, which sounds odd at first because he had been so well connected. Since moving to New York City in 1949, he became the most sought-after commercial illustrator in advertising design, where images and their subsequent repetition in print bridged perfectly with popular culture.
Sammlung Froehlich, Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York
During his career in newsprint Warhol discovered the silkscreen, where he was able to insert news images — often sensational or grotesque — and then embellish them through the process of reprinting. Multiplicity underscored pictorial meaning within American culture such that Warhol’s phrase “over and over” became its own cliché. Thus, Andy Warhol’s ambition to make the same painting over and over was an evasive critique of American Modern art: Abstract Expressionism and the figurative works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
By the time he passed away in 1987, countless artists and celebrities claimed to have known him. And yet he was rich, poor…
