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Warhol deserves a lot of credit. He cut to the chase when it came to making an American art about American life in the mid-20th century. He eliminated a long-accepted filter between his various art forms and reality, letting the nation’s tarnished soul shine through in all its cheap, materialistic, radiant, often violent, implicitly erotic glory.

He trained his movie camera on real people doing nothing but staring back at the lens, sleeping, eating or kissing; on unscripted actors and nonactors making things up as they went along; on the emblematic Empire State Building, which he filmed with a stationary camera for some seven hours one night. In painting he skimmed images from newspapers, enlarged them onto silk-screens and slapped them onto canvas, before or after adding splashes of off-register color. He was aided by a preternatural instinct for motifs of ever-growing resonance: portraits of Marilyn, Jackie, Liz and Mao, pictures of Coke bottles and soup cans, car crashes, race riots and electric chairs.

His two-tier process separated color from image, a radical move that made thinness a beautiful thing in itself, a perfect visual metaphor for the fragile, transitory nature of life and the basis for an indelible Warhol brand.

-New York Times

Sept 13 2012