VOYEURISTIC GENIUS

Warhol’s women are usually more interesting than his men. “He admired women. He wanted to be one. He wanted to be involved in their creation,” suggested Geldzahler. Among political portraits, the greatest are the 16-panel mourning canvas “Jackie”, based on newspaper shots taken hours after Kennedy’s assassination, painted in the blues and greys of civil war America, and the spectacular, shifting, Technicolor images of Mao, imbued with sexual ambiguity and a sinister play on the link between eroticism and power.

Understanding this relationship lay at the root of Warhol’s voyeuristic genius. “He cringed from physical contact. It was that celibacy that gave him enormous manipulative power over the magnificently beautiful people he brought together,” recalled his Factory friend Gerard Malanga. Detachment, the aestheticising stare of the ascetic as well as the dandy, determined the neutrality with which Warhol fixed the materialistic, spiritually bankrupt mood of western late capitalism, co-opting even Mao into his vision of psychedelic emptiness.

Financial Times
March 27 2009