Andy Warhol’s Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962
“I’m starting to think of Andy Warhol’s impact like a meteor striking
the earth,” says Mark Rosenthal, the organiser and guest curator of
“Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” at the Metropolitan
Museum in New York. “He created a new topography. And in that topography there are new rivers that form, many things change, to which people adapt. I’m
coming to think that Warhol did change the world and had the greatest
impact of any artist in the past 50 years.”It’s a thought-provoking
statement, but “we’re prepared to argue it” says Marla Prather, the
show’s co-curator and the Met’s curator of Modern and contemporary art. “In
terms of how Warhol keeps returning to us in the larger cultural
theatre of media, television, music, enterprise and even covers for your
iPhone, ask yourself, ‘Is there anyone who’s had a bigger influence?’”
Taking cues from other shows over the past decade that highlighted the
influence of artistic giants such as Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, the
Met calls “Regarding Warhol” the first major exhibition to explore
Warhol’s influence on his contemporaries and younger generations in
depth. Alongside 45 works by Warhol such as Red Jackie, 1964,
and Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962, the Met has brought together 100
works by around 60 other artists that Prather says have “reacted,
reinterpreted and responded”, to Warhol’s work, including Alex Katz,
Deborah Kass, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton, Hans Haacke, Chuck Close,
Barbara Kruger, Anselm Kiefer, Ai Weiwei and Ryan Trecartin.Explaining
the genesis of the exhibition, Rosenthal says: “I was struck by how
often I read that Warhol is the most influential artist of the past 50
years. Every time I saw that statement [however], the writer
never said anything afterwards. So I asked, ‘Why is he? Or how is he?
Compared with who?’” Rosenthal wanted to answer those questions and
whether it was all “a ridiculous idea” with a full exhibition at the
Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), where he has worked as an adjunct
curator since 2007.But due to the DIA’s recent financial problems, the
Metropolitan Museum began to take over “Regarding Warhol” about two
years ago, with Rosenthal still in place as its curator, and the five
themes that he had defined for the show: newspapers and magazines,
celebrity portraiture, queer studies, appropriation, and a wider final
section on “business, collaboration and spectacle”.For the exhibition’s
catalogue, which includes an essay by Rosenthal on the five themes,
Prather interviewed 13 artists about their artistic relationships to
Warhol. She says that the museum took account of whether artists
wanted their work to appear in an exhibition about Warhol’s influence,
and that Katz was “on the fence” about being included. “Alex is
still talking about what Warhol took from him,” Prather says. She
mentions that during their interview, she told him: “ ‘Alex, if you feel
that Andy stole from you, now’s the time to go on record [laughs].’
People are still absorbing and still fighting it. So I don’t
think that these artists live in the shadow of Warhol. They’re
individuals in their own right who have taken Warhol’s ideas and
stretched them beyond what we could have ever imagined.”The exhibition,
which is sponsored by the financial services firm Morgan Stanley, is
planned to include an educational programme and an audio tour narrated
by the film-maker and actor John Waters. Eric Magnuson
Categories: Post-War (1945-70)Contemporary (1970-present)
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