Late but Not Great Warhol

At Barcelona’s Picasso Museum, I once overheard an American couple exclaim over the Spanish artist’s extraordinary youthful facility with a pencil. I wasn’t eavesdropping. They were making a commotion.

As the couple looked at a display case filled with drawings he made at the age of 14, 15, 16, they were agog. Like most Americans, they obviously knew Picasso as a Modernist--better yet, as the Modernist--whose incisive abstractions changed the course of 20th century art. They were unprepared for a teenage prodigy who drew realist pictures like a whiz--acute charcoal renderings of classical statuary, precise pencil portraits, careful landscape studies and more.

Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso took most of his academic training as an artist in Barcelona, the rough but cosmopolitan city on the Mediterranean at the northeast corner of Spain. The museum’s spotty collection is strongest in work he did while a student there.

“Look at this!” sputtered the husband to the wife, as he went from one youthful drawing to the next. “It’s amazing! Look how well he could draw! And then somehow he ... he ... he just lost it!”

Of course, most observers would say that when he made his wildly inventive foray into Cubist abstraction in 1907, at the age of 26, Picasso actually found it. Not only hadn’t he “lost” anything, he had gained such facility with the tools of art that he could make unexpected visual magic happen. Had Picasso continued throughout his long life (he died at 91) to make the kind of proficient academic drawings that so excited the American couple, there would be no Picasso Museum in Barcelona today. He’d be just another talented but forgotten artist.

I thought of that couple the other day when I was reading a review in the New York Times of the retrospective of paintings by Andy Warhol that winds up its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art next Sunday. It certainly wasn’t the Pop artist’s youthful facility with a pencil that brought the scene to mind. Warhol didn’t have much of that. A clumsy 1942 self-portrait, drawn when the Pittsburgh lad was 14, shows that draftsmanship was never his long suit.

Warhol did go on to develop a compelling graphic style in the 1950s, which made him hugely successful as a commercial artist in New York working in the field of product advertising. It’s not surprising, though, that this elegant graphic technique typically involved tracing over photographs with pen and ink. Then, like a Hollywood diva gazing into a makeup mirror, Warhol would blot the wet line with tissue paper.

The result was a line of dappled sensuousness. Maybe the guy couldn’t draw, but he sure had style.

What reminded me of the Barcelona experience was the critic’s claim that Warhol’s art from the 1970s and 1980s--that is, work from the decades following his classic Pop paintings, prints and underground films of the 1960s--is “ripe for serious reassessment.” Those are the years when Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, car crashes and electric chairs were all pretty much behind him. Warhol’s career can be (and usually is) divided into three parts: the early advertising art, the classic 1960s Pop and the late work. (He died in 1987 at age 58, so “late” is relatively early in the normal scheme of things.) The first two have been fully scrutinized in museum shows; the third one hasn’t.

MOCA’s painting retrospective is heavily weighted toward the extraordinarily productive Pop years of 1962 to 1968. The late work is given pretty short shrift. I think the discrepancy is appropriate. Late Warhol isn’t great Warhol. And for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, that doesn’t diminish his significance.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol was making silk-screen paintings of skulls, commissioned portraits of the rich and/or famous, military camouflage patterns and more. He was also tinkering with technique--adding sparkly diamond dust into his pigment, urinating onto copper-laced pigment that would oxidize and turn green, even returning to painting by hand, rather than with photographic silk-screens, in mural-sized copies of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” He also tried collaborating with such fashionable younger artists as Francesco Clemente and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Examples are on view at MOCA, but none is seen in depth.

The critic didn’t say why reassessment of late Warhol was pressing or what exactly it has to offer that is so significant. But the statement does reflect the degree to which Warhol’s post-1960s work has been held in rather low regard. Warhol’s Pop art is widely accepted as a watershed. And then somehow he ... he ... he just lost it.

At least, so goes the conventional wisdom. Warhol was a quintessential new artist for the 1960s, and when the ‘60s were over, so--inevitably--was he. But now, decades after the fact and 15 years after the artist’s death, rediscovery of the long-obscured brilliance of the later work is what’s expected, as surely as spring follows winter.

Well, not so fast. MOCA’s Warhol retrospective is right to emphasize the classic Pop paintings. One of the great things about the show is that Warhol’s art of the 1960s is ripe for reassessment, never mind that of the 1970s and 1980s.

Among its supporters and detractors, Warhol’s Pop has long been perceived--and I would say, misperceived--for its social rather than artistic content. Love it or hate it, this interpretation goes, Warhol brought mass-production techniques and mass-media images into art’s mainstream, thereby generating the mechanism for a critique of popular culture. Pop culture--corporate, commercial and coercive--has inundated contemporary experience. From inside the superior precincts of art, this mistaken idea goes, Warhol was commenting on the debasements of the larger society.

Likewise, Warhol’s late work has been held in low regard not so much because of its artistic merits, but because it too has been considered in social terms. Critics come close to castigating the artist for moral lassitude. How vulgar of Warhol to have sold off his talents to the highest bidder, taking commissions for portraits of socialites and captains of industry. How cheesy to have sprinkled diamond dust into his paint, like some medieval artisan weighing out the lapis lazuli to be ground into pigment for the Virgin Mary’s robe. How awful to have tried to ride the coattails of a younger generation of stylish 1980s superstars.

A reconsideration of Warhol in the 1960s, however, shows that Warhol’s Pop icons don’t critique popular culture at all. His paintings don’t exploit the stylish visual language of mass media to deconstruct social ills. If they criticize anything, it’s the foolish pretensions of high culture. The flamboyant paintings creatively manipulate seductive media glamour to signify haughty cliches about established Modern art--from Picasso’s lifelong Romantic obsession with sex and death to Jackson Pollock’s all-American machismo. In the process, mass culture is redeemed.

Warhol was an artist who deconstructed art, not society. Once the 1960s work is reassessed in this way, the late work falls into place. He didn’t “lose it” in the 1970s and 1980s--he kept it up. Mixing diamond dust into acrylic was his Tiffany version of the old Cubist trick of mixing sand into oil paint to give the surface visual grit. Urinating onto copper pigment, so that oxidation would turn it green, gave Pollock’s famous drip paintings a venerable (and witty) patina of age--while also varnishing the legendary story about Pollock’s peeing into Peggy Guggenheim’s marble fireplace during a drunken uptown cocktail party in 1944.

Does that mean there’s no difference between Warhol’s paintings from the 1960s and his later work? Of course not. The 1960s work is more significant, if only because it was the leading edge that broke a logjam in our perceptions of art. Whenever a new artist makes a cataclysmic stir there follows a period in which everything he or she does is perceived to be a letdown. The risible shock of the new, which is among art’s distinctive pleasures, cannot be maintained in perpetuity.

There is also genuine repetitiousness in late Warhol and the sense that he’s searching (in vain) for a new version of the kick that animated the ‘60s. I also assume that, obsessed with his own publicity, he sometimes painted just to fulfill expectations. A lot of critics noted early on that death was a central theme in his paintings of the 1960s--from post-suicide Marilyn Monroe to the great series of electric chairs and car crashes. Given Warhol’s reliance on tabloid newspaper sources for his art, the theme of tragic mortality is inescapable. But by 1976, when he began a large series of paintings focused on a human skull, he must have known he was feeding his own mythology while giving it the high-culture gloss of Shakespearean tragedy.

Alas, poor Andy. By 1976 we knew him too well.

Indeed, with late Warhol there is the big problem of his success. Warhol’s sense of visual style had certainly been triumphant. The world at large had come to look very much the way his flashy paintings looked in the 1960s. So, in the 1970s and 1980s, his own art inevitably seemed less distinctive.

And that’s the key to the late work. Warhol didn’t lose it. He just kept making more.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.