Andy Warhol Campbells Tomato Soup Can

Result #1

Andy Warhol Campbells Tomato Soup Can, 1987, in a hauntingly inviting work from the same year—and a brief history of Minimalism itself.The work also shares a rough and cheerful visualness with earlier contemporary work by the likes of Michael Graves and Cindy Sherman, but this is one of the few works by a woman artist of any renown who is not a straight math geek. Her art is full of moments of wonder, too, with A.M.S.B. in the thick of a road, 1996, an elegant, almost liturgical sculpture by Monika Niewowitz, or a simple, black-and-white, cross-hatched print by Ann Powers, or a small, deep-blue dot by Linda Myers—what all these works seem to signify for her.But in a sense, many of the works in the show come from far-flung places and on many different centuries. See the small, visually suggestive photo-based work from 1997 by the Soviet artist and poet Anatolia Gorzhova, or the art of Mexican peasant artists who are at the forefront of the practice of the Zapatista movement, which hailed from the region of Oaxaca. Some of the more famous of these works, such as Skins, 1977–78, by Rubén Sánchez and Daniel de Rojas, are notable, including especially their bright and bright palette of graffiti. But what makes the work of these lesser-known artists so surprising is the sheer quantity of work on view. A striking example of this is the terrific selection of work by Rosalind Krauss, whose epigraphic stories and satirical sketches are made to weave together in her less grandly philosophical oeuvre. In The Museum of Modern Art, 2001, for example, Krauss evokes the glamour of the process art movement by juxtaposing oversize parts of the early Modernist aesthetic with portraits of herself and friends from the period.

Result #2

, all but washed out of the canvas, hints at the distance of age. The turquoise skin of Warhols work with pencils and soft-gloss colors provides a contrasting ground against the stark black ground of the surface; the thin black lines play off the shape of the watercolors, and the surfaces matte finish provides a hint of color. Warhols approach to the drawing of oil paint seems both to be playful and to suggest that he was looking for a way to break the rules of reality. In fact, the self-imposed restrictions of the mediums he used to enforce his ideas about painting—painted lines, thickly painted color, and so on—are, in fact, highly rigid, even as they are absurd. What he was trying to say, in effect, was that he didnt want to break the rules of painting but he could use them to create a new kind of painting.

Result #3

Andy Warhol Campbells Tomato Soup Can, and Sam Francis Bossypants, as well as some of the more obvious, if less compelling, Warhols works, such as two small-scale drawings of female nude bodies, one of which is the anchor of this show, appear to have a rather weak basis in reality. The drawings are more familiar, but are not very interesting. The drawings, at least, in the show, bear the signatures of two artists whom Warhol addressed to him—Bill Crawford and Harry Harrison. While Harrison and Crawford make both the best of Warhol, Harrison makes the best of Crawford; it is difficult to compare the two, except in the work of both Warhol and Harrison, which is by nature disinterested, a refabrication of the real. This shows two lesser works by Warhol are noteworthy. The first is an assemblage of colored pencils, collaged from photographs, that depicts a black-and-white study for the canvas of a body of a young boy by Warhol. The boy sits on a throne and his back is turned, as though he were a black king. The second work is a design for the drawing chair in the first room of the gallery. Here we find a series of grey-green pencil lines, and the painting is drawn in large blocks of charcoal, the colors of which are more interesting than the drawing itself. But the idea behind it is that the drawing chair and the drawing chair would be perfect objects for making Warhols paints.And so the audience for Warhols paintings is not the same audience for Warhols drawings, but it is the same audience for the works of Warhol—who has always had a firm grasp of the possibilities of his medium. Warhols drawings have been compared with those of the Abstract Expressionists. The difference is that his drawings, with their figures and their lyrical images, are usually rendered in oil paint, rather than in an ink or drypoint.

Result #4

Andy Warhol Campbells Tomato Soup Can, 1985, is the most resonant. When Warhol dropped the can into a shallow tank and poured a glass, it covered the entirety of the painting, save for one finger that was on its side, as if the paint had been left in place. Because the stain—and the tiny print of the thing—can never be seen, the images that were actually there are merely subtle, little-seen details. The visual manifestation of war—the gore of Warhols painting—becomes an attack on war-culture.We are all victims of war, Halcyon Howard once observed. War is not an abstraction, but an attack on abstraction, when we feel a loss of control over our own image, our own world, and our own senses. War is our own moment in which we feel like victims, and like victims we act out our own imaginations. War can only be repressed, only be erased. It is a permanent and debilitating state of mind, a state of being that refuses to be revealed. It cannot be swept away with the waves of historical rewritings, to be drawn into the dark hall of memory, and eventually out. War is a lonely and desperate attempt to understand the world, to establish a new culture, and to overcome the constant orgy of violence that threatens to engulf the world.Even if you dont like Warhol, you cant make it without Warhol, Halcyon Howard observed. That Warhol is as indispensable to Warhol as a digital processing center is a testament to the importance of the intellectual to the artistic. Halcyon Howard called Art Inflections a trilogy of serious intransigence. Art Inflections is the self-help drama of people who look to art as a body of knowledge. Art Inflections is not art; it is art. . . .

Result #5

Andy Warhol Campbells Tomato Soup Can, 1937, is a present-day pastiche, its iconography of a still life, in this case of an icon, of a three-dimensional model, a picture of the representation of something. It has a curious ability to imply a myriad of historical relationships and to reflect the idea of the transcendent triptych. Its function is to make for a simulation of a kind of painting that would not be possible without an actual world. The painterly act of painting in Warhols universe is a way of projecting the idea of something other than painting itself. That idea, which is constructed from many different colors, forms a spectrum, and, more importantly, is an organism, one that has a complex life of its own. Warhols subjects are phenomena of their own creation—the phenomena of experience, the phenomena of intelligence. His subject matter is the full spectrum of experience, a universe that has a complex life of its own. Warhols best works are the most complex and most complex in that they constantly reexamine and recombine the data of experience, his favorite metaphor. In these paintings, the paints are painted so thin that they lose the expressive power of their application and become as abstract as a body of air. That air, which gives rise to vivid colors and intense light, generates the deepest, most intensely reflective, and most vivid resonance that can be achieved by painting. This is why the images are so deep, because their quality of reflection gives rise to a constant and almost darkening effect that is almost impossible to achieve.In this exhibition, Warhols most complex paintings were also the most simple and the most transparent. The works are often made up of three or four canvases, with some being painted on large sheet lead sheets that extend from four feet to more than seven. The surfaces are painted in thin varnish.