Thursday, July 01, 2010

IS WARHOL PORTRAIT OF «JEWS OF THE 20th CENTURY» GOOD FOR THE JEWS?

Thirty years ago, Andy Warhol's "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" opened in New York to critical derision. The curmudgeonly Hilton Kramer famously chipped away at Warhol's already diminished reputation, which was in free fall until Warhol's death in 1987. At the time, Kramer and others ridiculed Warhol's project as one more example of cynical spuriousness by the artist. This scorn for Warhol's late period work is partially recounted in The New York Times story published only a few weeks ago and taped to one of the exhibition walls at the Oregon Jewish Museum, where Warhol's portrait show of great Jewish individuals has re-emerged. Looking at them now, the 10 portraits don't seem fresh, but they hardly seem the stuff of controversy. They're benign, hollow works. There's no there there. But that was the complaint issued by critics then. These were some of the century's most extraordinary figures, after all -- Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein and George Gershwin among them. They deserved gravitas, depth, meaning. But Warhol depicted them with laissez-faire, without too much thought. The portraits are soulless and rightly fuel the perception that they were like a lot of late Warhol works -- about the bottom line. But that's true of much of Warhol's oeuvre, and in retrospect, what's so puzzling about those criticisms at the time. Warhol's genius was conceptual -- it was about the art of commercial marketing and manipulation, crafting public perception. Indeed, Warhol's art was about the craft of meretriciousness, which Damien Hirst has since brilliantly made into his own kind of currency.

www.oregonlive.com

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