Warhol MOOC

Week 3 Death
Further reading extracts
EXTRACT ONE
Neil Printz, Painting Death in America, in Andy Warhol: Death and
Disasters, Houston, Texas: Houston Fine Art Press, 1988, pp.11-22.
[] The narrative conventions inherent to photo-journalism are decisive in
determining why Warhols Death and Disaster paintings look the way they do.
The photographs that Warhol chose of such subjects as suicides, car crashes,
race riots, a burn victims rescue, a gangsters funeral, and an atomic bomb
explosion, all explicitly depict occurrences. Every picture tells a story, whether
commonplace, criminal, or historical. Other subjects from poisoned tunafish,
the electric chair, the Most Wanted Men, and Jackie do not depict events,
so much as referencing them within the context of a narrative not directly
shown.
[] Warhol was fascinated by car crashes, avidly collecting photographs of
them during his time. Their deployment in paintings during 1963 reflects
developments in narrative and emotional texture, culminating with the
Ambulance Disasters and Saturday Disaster of late 1963 and early 1964.
Their scale, power, and apparent veracity tend to stun criteria of style,
demanding engagement with the images face value.
Warhols Car Crashes depict particularly gruesome deaths they constitute
some of the most violent imagery in the history of art, with a graphic verism
unprecedented outside of contemporary mass-media. Pictures of violence,
like erotic images, automatically trigger a range of psychological responses.
As Warhol observed:
When you read Genet you get all hot, and that makes some people say
this is not art. The thing I like about it is that it make you forget about
style and that sort of thing; style isnt really important.
Warhols most violent images go well beyond Pop Arts lurking surreptitious
original in the simulated copy. The force of the original narrative in these
works transgresses the mediations of Warhols visual style. As his subject
escalates in intensity, style becomes increasingly transparent.
Warhols car crash victims epitomize the ordinary American. Without a
caption, identities remain anonymous. They are social unknowns, suffering
what has been called plebian catastrophes. The automobile as a vehicle of
social mobility and leisure was a proud attainment of the working middle class
during the prosperity of the post-war years; the car crash turns the American
Dream into a nightmare. As has been noted, pictures of car crashes provoke
considerable anxiety in the modern viewer. Like the contaminated canned
food in the Tunafish Disasters the dark side of the Campbells Soup Can
paintings they represent a breach of faith in the products of the Industrial
Revolution by featuring consumer products that bring death.

Beyond the banality conventionally ascribed to them, Warhols Car Crashes

also touch upon another mythology: the car crash as the transfiguring event in
a cult of male subjectivity. The ardent non-conformity of the hero, whether
James Dean or Jackson Pollock, would tragically culminate in violent, selfinflicted deaths. This anti-hero-worship enjoyed a special currency during the
late 1950s. To the popular mind, Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist,
represented a rebel with an inexplicable cause. The crypto-hagiography of
macho martyrdom would not have been lost on Warhol. For him it was not a
matter of parodying or celebrating the cult, but of exorcising its awe by
bringing it all back home to the everyday. In Warhols world, there is no
subtextual glamour in death by car crash; the very mundaneness of his
victims and their grotesque deaths compels viewer empathy.
In contrast to Warhols paintings of car crashes, the series representing the
electric chair is remarkable for its visual sobriety and emotional
understatement. Throughout his several series based on the subject in 1963,
1965 and 1967, Warhol used the same image, only varying the way he
cropped or tinted it. The simple and even stolid form of the electric chair is
visually fixed in place near the centre of a clearly-defined pictorial space
devoid of human presence. The Electric Chairs, with its near-frontality and
unchanging recurrence, is the most iconic of Warhols Death and Disaster
images. The serenity and dignity invoked by the sign at the right, reading
Silence, resonates with the emptiness of the execution chamber and the
electric chair. The photograph selected by Warhol represents death as
absence and silence, a conjured void. This notion was characteristic for
Warhol, who wrote many years later:
I never understood why when you died, you didnt just vanish and
everything could just keep going the way it was, only you just wouldnt
be there. I always thought Id like my own tombstone to be blank. No
epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, Id like it to say Figment.
[] In November 1963, while Warhol was working on his Death and Disaster
paintings, Art News published an interview with him by Gene Swenson. What
he had to say about these works is revealing:
We went to see Dr. No at Forty-Second Street. Its a fantastic movie,
so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right
in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood. I saw blood on
people and all over. I saw in the paper last week that there were more
people throwing them its just part of the scene and hurting people.
My show in Paris is going to be called Death in America. Ill show the
electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and
some suicide pictures.
Why did you start these Death pictures?
I believe in it. Did you see the Enquirer this week? It had The Wreck
that Made Cops Cry a head cut in half, the arms and hands just lying
there. Its sick, but Im sure it happens all the time. Ive met a lot of

cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only its almost

impossible to get pictures from them.
When did you start with the Death series?
I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a
newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that
everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or
Labor Day a holiday and every time you turned on the radio they
said something like 4 million are going to die. That started it. But
when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesnt really
have any effect.
But youre still doing Elizabeth Taylor pictures.
I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody
said she was going to die. Now Im doing them all over, putting bright
colours on her lips and eyes.
Although the Paris exhibition which took place soon afterwards was not called
Death in America, the conception is fundamental. Throughout his career,
Warhol insisted on the American-ness of his work, and death was no
exception. In 1967, he stated:
I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think its so great.
Its fantastic. Id like to work in Europe but I wouldnt do the same
things, Id do different things. I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but Im
not a social critic. I just paint these objects in my paintings because
those are the things I know best
That Warhol should choose to Americanize death, domesticates it within his
own experience, and helps to contextualize this seemingly anomalous subject
matter within the body of his Pop Art. Indeed, it was even better to profess a
touristic parochialism before so august a subject as death. It allowed Andy to
play the Innocent Abroad, even in the valley of the shadow of death.
EXTRACT TWO
Trevor Fairbrother, Skulls, in Gary Garrels, ed., The Work of Andy
Warhol, Seattle: Bay Press, 1989, pp.96-109.
The Skulls and the Hammer and Sickle series were made in the same
year, but only the latter were featured in a New York exhibition (Castelli,
January 1977). The Skulls remain lesser known, having received virtually no
critical opinion during the artists lifetime. They were shown in Heiner
Friedrichs Cologne and Munich galleries in 1977-78, and eventually Friedrich
acquired most of the larger canvases for the Dia Art Foundation. Warhol
bought the skull depicted in the paintings in a Paris flea market in the midseventies, and on his return to New York he polled his closest associates at
the Factory about using it as a subject. His business manager, Fred Hughes,
the oracle of uptown taste, recalled the great things Zurbarn and Picasso
had done with skulls. His studio assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, the oracle of

downtown attitude, agreed that the subject was a classic, and that it would be
like doing the portrait of everybody in the world. Since it is impossible to
determine visually whether a skull is male or female, Cutrones wry
observation also suggests that Warhols universal deaths head portrait was a
counter-balance to his ongoing campaign for portrait commissions from the
rich and successful.
Ronnie Cutrone was asked to shoot black and white photographs of the skull,
side-lit for dramatic shadows. Warhols skull drawings tracings of the
projected photographs show the range of images that Warhol first worked
with. Four photographs and a drawing after each of them became the basis of
a portfolio of four screenprints published by Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1976.
[] The composition Warhol chose for the large and giant size canvases was
the one with a careful balance between the skull and the ambiguously open
space around it, and a play between the tight dark shadow and the bright
dome of the cranium. This three-quarters view gives the skull a somewhat
biomorphic, pear-shaped profile, without missing any of the classic skull
features the black holes of eyes and nose, and fanglike teeth in a grin of
death. Ronnie Cutrone realized that in this particular set-up, the shadow
suggested the head of a foetus. He says he emphasized the effect when he
was setting up for the photograph, after accidentally discovering a suggestion
of birth in the shadow of death. It is not known if this contributed to Warhols
eventual preference for the image.
[] Even though much of Warhols classic sixties imagery money, green
stamps, consumer products, pulp publications, popular idols is read
primarily in terms of the opium of the American middle class, his sense of the
impermanent occasionally slipped into these subjects. For example, the
paintings and drawings of soup cans with torn labels, of opened cans, and of
flattened cans; or those showing rows of Coca-Cola bottles whose contents
range from full to empty. We accept his need for The American Dream, but
are still learning the extent to which his morbidity and The American Way of
Death informed his personality. One might speculate that his Central
European Czechoslovakian heritage predisposed him to the grim and the
anguished (and to the humorous, for that matter). His childhood was
impoverished, plagued by illness, and dominated by Catholicism. Henry
Geldzahler remembers midnight phone calls from Warhol in the mid-sixties:
he would say that he was scared of dying if he went to sleep.
[] When he painted the Skulls in the 1970s, Warhol and his Factory circle
were working with the European art market more closely than ever before,
and it is tempting to read into this series a new strategy to engage in pictorial
traditions that have always been a part of the Old World art market. (It is
wrong, however, to assume that because he was a Pop artist he was learning
about such things as the vanitas still life for the first time: a knowing openness
to art history had been essential to his personal style as an illustrator in the
fifties.) Relating Warhols Skull paintings to skulls in earlier art is an easy
game. His are so uncompromisingly casual and minimal that they could be
modern stand-ins for all religious works and vanitas still lifes that include
skulls. Since the sixteenth century, Jesuits have promoted the contemplation

of death as a spiritual exercise. The skull became a symbolic detail in

compositions as an attribute of St. Francis of Assisi, of hermit saints, and of
the penitent Magdalen. Two years before Warhol painted the Skulls, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the earliest vanitas still life in
existence, a 1603 Dutch painting by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder. I do not
know if it influenced Warhol in any way, although I suspect that any art image
combining death and money would interest him. Certainly, it articulates
symbols of transience in ways that he would have appreciated.
[] In painting the skull, Warhol chose a subject that was perhaps an obvious
one for him, and yet his interpretation was memorable, paradoxical, and
beautiful. Rather than drain its meaning, his reductionism created a statement
that could stand comparison with any image of a skull, and could speak to any
death threat (not only to people, but also ideas, beliefs, or the artists own
career). In fact, Warhol related his Skulls to Italian fascism in 1977: Weve
been in Italy so much, and everybodys always asking me if Im a communist
because Ive done Mao. So now Im doing hammers and sickles for
communism, and skulls for fascism. By inviting comparisons with fascist
emblems, he risked criticism and misinterpretation rather than repress any
possible association that the Skulls might carry, whether intended or not.