A Visit to the AGO’s 2021 Andy Warhol Retrospective

The Art Gallery of Ontario had been closed for much of the pandemic. When it reopened in July 2021, I hurried over to see the long-awaited Andy Warhol retrospective.

Andy Warhol was hardly unfamiliar to me. I knew him as the defining figure of Pop Art, and I had seen an entire wall of his Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was one of the four masters of modern art featured in a BBC documentary. I knew his silkscreens and his repeated portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Stephen Shore, one of my favourite photographers, had come of age at Warhol’s Factory.

And yet the enigmatic Warhol remained surrounded by questions. Where did he come from? How did he become a pioneer of Pop Art? Why was he shot? Perhaps this exhibition would unravel the mysteries one by one.

Introduction

Andy Warhol redefined what art could look like in an age of social, political, and technological change. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the media transformed how Americans received news and information, while an expanding global economy brought recognizable brands and trademarks into everyday life. At the same time, the civil rights movement and sexual liberation promised freedom to people who had previously been denied full citizenship.

Although Warhol often celebrated these developments, he also used his art to challenge the American dream of prosperity and success.

The working-class son of Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe, Warhol became a celebrity obsessed with fame—an obsession that overshadowed the pain this shy gay man endured in his struggle to become an artist.

By focusing on Warhol’s personal story, we can better understand how his lived experience led him to redefine art in ways that remain relevant today.

Pop and Silkscreen Printing

In 1962, Warhol began using commercial silkscreen printing to speed up the reproduction of images. He repeatedly drew on photographs from newspapers and magazines. Although the process reduced the visible hand of the artist, Warhol adapted his images by deliberately applying too much or too little ink.

Warhol described the making of these silkscreened Pop works as being “like a machine,” since the process was often mechanized and passed through many hands. Its collaborative and impersonal nature appealed to him. He once suggested that “everybody should be a machine,” because machines do not discriminate.

If people functioned like machines, then “everybody should be like everybody,” regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Warhol’s open, fluid approach to both art and people reflected the social changes and intellectual debates of the 1960s.

Ethel Scull 36 Times

Multicoloured Paintings and the Naming of Works

When Warhol began silkscreening in 1962, he would have a professional printer turn an image into a stencil. He also specified the crop, dimensions, and final contrast he wanted. The resulting impressions were most often printed in black ink on unstretched linen canvas. Silkscreening was “so simple,” Warhol once said. He described it as “quick and chancy,” adding that he was “thrilled with it.” For multicoloured works, he usually painted broad areas of colour onto the canvas before printing over them, sometimes adding further layers of paint afterward. With a few exceptions, Warhol did not title his works; they were generally given descriptive titles by others.

Marilyn Diptych (1962)Marilyn Monroe died from a drug overdose on August 5, 1962. Soon afterward, Warhol made his first painting of the actress, using as his source a publicity photograph from her 1953 film Niagara. The two starkly different halves of the diptych suggest the divide between the public and private lives of one of the world’s most famous women.

100 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)Warhol’s first major exhibition was held at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. It was there that he first showed his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings.Although these works were painted by hand, Warhol also used stencils to speed up production. He combined multiple images of the same variety of soup.Through repetition, he undermined ideas of originality and uniqueness while criticizing the relentless consumerism encouraged by postwar mass media.

Hand-Painted and Stencilled Pop Art

Although Warhol was already a successful commercial illustrator by the late 1950s, he wanted to be taken seriously as a fine artist.In 1960, inspired by work he saw in New York galleries, he began making paintings based on advertising imagery, using expressive brushwork. Two years later, he adopted silkscreen printing, which led to the graphic style now known as Pop Art.。As a child, Warhol drank a homemade “soup” of tomato ketchup mixed with salt and water. His choice of consumer products such as Campbell’s Soup Cans grew out of his experience as the son of poor, working-class immigrants trying to make a life in America. For Warhol, Campbell’s represented the America—and the consumer culture—he longed to join.

Before and After [3] (1961)This work was based on an advertisement for cosmetic surgery. In 1957, Warhol underwent an operation to remove a growth from the tip of his nose, a feature he felt made him look “too ethnic.” He was apparently bitterly disappointed with the result.Warhol remained deeply conscious of his appearance throughout his life, experimenting with fashion and makeup to change how he looked. In the early 1950s, he began covering his thinning hair with light-brown wigs, later switching to blond and silver-grey ones. By the late 1950s, he was also using contact lenses as well as glasses to correct his nearsightedness.

129 Die in Jet! (1962)New York curator Henry Geldzahler inspired this work, which marked the beginning of what Warhol called his Death and Disaster series. The painting was based on a newspaper front page reporting a crash at Paris Orly Airport in which 130 people died, among them members of the Atlanta Art Association. Instead of silkscreening, Warhol used a variety of painting, blotting, and stencilling techniques to capture the combination of photography and text through which newspapers conveyed information to the public.

The Factory

In 1963, Warhol established the Factory, an experimental art studio and social space on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan. It played a crucial role in cultivating the aura surrounding his fame. Warhol asked his collaborator and former lover Billy Name to cover the rooms in silver paint and aluminium foil. Paintings and sculptures were produced there in large quantities, and the studio also gave Warhol a place to pursue his new interest in underground filmmaking. After the original building was demolished, the Factory moved to Union Square in Lower Manhattan in 1967.

Between 1963 and 1972, Warhol and his collaborators made more than five hundred films. Usually unscripted and without coherent plots, they challenged the conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema. They often starred Warhol’s “Superstars,” a shifting cast of personalities who spent time at the Factory. By the mid-1960s, the Factory and the scene around it had become a living work of art—as famous and controversial as Warhol’s paintings.

Elvis I and II (1963–64)Although Warhol’s best-known celebrity portraits are of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he also portrayed male actors and singers.This doubled image of Elvis Presley came from a publicity still for the 1960 film Flaming Star. Locked and loaded, the gun-wielding performer evokes stereotypes of 1950s masculinity—both the slick bad boy and the Wild West cowboy. Yet Warhol also turns Elvis into a queer, feminized icon in a tight-fitting shirt and lavender trousers.

Silver Liz as Cleopatra (1963)When Warhol made this painting in 1963, Elizabeth Taylor had become the first actor in history to earn more than one million dollars for a single role, starring in that year’s highest-grossing film, Cleopatra.Beyond commenting on Taylor’s fame and the celebrity image created by mass media, Warhol also alludes to the illusion and fantasy of the silver screen. Taylor’s repeated silkscreened image appears to hover before the hand-painted silver background. Warhol would make this sensation of floating literal in his 1966 work Silver Clouds.

Cow Wallpaper [Pink on Yellow] (1966)

In 1965, at the height of his fame, Warhol announced that he was retiring from painting to concentrate on filmmaking.

The following year, he staged his “farewell” at a New York gallery. One room contained nothing but wallpaper printed with fluorescent-pink cows. Another held Silver Clouds—helium-filled metallic silver balloons that drifted through the gallery and could be moved by visitors. The work continued Warhol’s long association with silver: the Silver Factory, his silver paintings, and his silver-grey wigs.

Silver Clouds (1966)

Warhol described Silver Clouds, created in collaboration with engineer Billy Klüver, as “paintings that float.” He wanted to challenge the dominance of Minimalism in the New York art world, with its emphasis on order, mathematical precision, and heavy industrial materials. Although Silver Clouds was also made from an industrial material—a silver laminate called Scotchpak—Warhol’s work centred on fluidity, buoyancy, and motion.

Examples of Unscripted Films

Back to Work

After Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968, Warhol transformed the Union Square Factory from an open social space into a studio devoted to what he called “business art.” As he explained, “Making money is art, and working is art—and good business is the best art.”Around this time, Warhol began producing large-format printed versions of his earlier works. He also made decorative yet politically charged wallpaper and continued to explore more experimental art forms, responding, for example, to artists around the world who were investigating performance as a medium.As an artwork, he recorded himself vacuuming the gallery carpet for an exhibition.Warhol also began making his Factory Diaries: Videos of Life in the Factory and at Home.

Facsimile Mao (1974)

Warhol often asked other people what he should paint, film, or print. Around 1972, his art dealer suggested portraying the twentieth century’s most “important” person—perhaps the scientist Albert Einstein. Warhol, however, chose Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, whom Life magazine had recently named the most famous person in the world.

The ubiquity of Mao’s image in China during the 1960s and 1970s fed Warhol’s fascination with communism. He wanted to create what he called “Commonist” art, often comparing the “social equality” proclaimed by communist governments with the way consumer goods were available to everyone in capitalist society.

In 1967, Warhol began publishing prints for public sale under the name “Factory Additions.” His first project was a portfolio of silkscreen prints based on his signature subjects.

He began with Marilyn Monroe; eight of the ten prints are shown here. Warhol used the same process he had employed for the famous Marilyn Diptych discussed earlier. Each image was printed in five layers—one photographic layer and four others, each in a particular colour. He deliberately misregistered some of the layers to create a painterly effect. Speaking of his repetition of this and other images, Warhol once said, “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away.”

“The better and emptier you feel.”

Electric Chair (1971)

Since the late nineteenth century, electrocution in the electric chair has been a common method of execution in the United States.

Warhol created this series of ten electric-chair images in 1971, experimenting with colour and composition while pursuing an idea that had haunted him since the 1960s: the mass media’s constant exposure of death numbs us to its relentless presence in our lives. By making a series of silkscreen prints, he also followed his model of “business art,” producing works he could sell for profit. But he was equally interested in repetition’s emotional effect. As he put it, “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.”

Ladies and Gentlemen

In 1975, Warhol produced a series featuring unnamed Black and Latinx drag queens and transgender women. It was commissioned by the Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino, who also supplied the title Ladies and Gentlemen. As the title suggests, Anselmino was more interested in the theatricality of gender than in the sitters’ lived experiences. Only a few of the models have been identified, and their names are known solely because Warhol asked them to sign their Polaroids. He took more than five hundred photographs of fourteen models.

Warhol’s friends recruited the models from local drag bars. Some of the photographs were enlarged, turned into silkscreens, and printed onto painted canvases. Using expressive brushwork and finger painting, Warhol created new relationships between the richly textured layers. Ultimately, the series explores not only gender and performance, but glamour and individuality.

The Shooting

On June 3, 1968, radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol at Union Square, damaging his internal organs. That same afternoon, she also targeted former AGO chief curator Mario Amaya. Warhol was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead before doctors managed to revive him.

In the SCUM Manifesto, which she described as social propaganda and which called for an end to men and capitalist society, Solanas claimed that Warhol had stolen her ideas.

The shooting affected Warhol’s physical and mental health for the rest of his life and prompted him to reassess the way he lived. He had to wear a surgical corset, struggled to eat, and became anxious around strangers. Unsurprisingly, he ended the Factory’s open-door policy.

Warhol and the Music Industry

Warhol collaborated with rock musicians on a wide variety of projects. With singer Nico and the Velvet Underground, he created the experimental multimedia event the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, he also demonstrated his versatility by designing record covers for major labels and creating album artwork for popular musicians including John Lennon, Diana Ross, and Aretha Franklin.

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable

By combining film with live performance and music, Warhol and his Factory collaborators expanded the very idea of cinema. In 1966, he co-organized a multimedia show initially presented under the name Andy Warhol and later retitled the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or EPI.Alongside the avant-garde rock band the Velvet Underground and the unconventional singer Nico, the EPI featured overlapping projections of still images and Warhol films. Coloured gels and strobe lights washed over the projections, while Factory Superstars including Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov danced through the three-dimensional space with whips. The EPI toured music venues and university campuses across the United States, enhancing Warhol’s reputation as a countercultural artist. Its techniques have since become standard in live music, testimony to Warhol’s innovation in merging audience and performers within an immersive environment of light, image, and sound.

Interview

Warhol founded Interview in 1968 as a magazine devoted to film and poetry. Although he claimed he started it simply to give his assistant Gerard Malanga “something to do,” it soon became an important meeting place for his interests in film, fashion, art, and music. Interview pioneered a journalistic format in which celebrities interviewed other celebrities, giving Warhol and his associates an insider’s view.
Many people assume that Warhol designed the covers himself. In fact, they were the work of Richard Bernstein (1939–2002), who worked for the magazine from 1979 to 1989.
Some art critics dismissed Interview and Warhol’s other “business art” projects as proof that the artist had sold out. Yet these ventures also funded his more experimental work, including the Torsos series, based on erotic photographs of actors and male models taken in gay bathhouses.

Torso (1977)

This work was based on a Polaroid of actor and filmmaker Bobby Houston standing on his head. Warhol transformed the original image into a painting that appears to refer simultaneously to ancient Roman sculpture and erotic photography.

Warhol called his paintings of male nudes “landscapes” because his focus was on the terrain of muscle and flesh rather than the sitter’s individuality.

Warhol, Film, and Video

Warhol’s experiments with video, film, and mass media extended to television projects produced with Vincent Fremont, through which he could reach a broader audience. In 1980, he premiered Andy Warhol’s TV

on cable television. In 1986, he recorded Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes for MTV. These programs drew on the artist’s fame, his circle of celebrity friends, and his obsession—dating back to the mid-1960s—with recording scenes from everyday life.

The programs followed the format of Interview magazine, broadcasting intimate conversations between stars.

On display here are excerpts from Andy Warhol’s TV from 1981, a Factory Diary from the same year, and a painting he created for a German film. The next gallery presents Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes from 1986.

Together, these works reveal the many different ways Warhol engaged with mass media during the 1980s.

Tongue in Ear (1980)

Based on one of Warhol’s photographs, this painting uses stylized, abstract forms to depict two young men in a homoerotic embrace, recalling

his line drawings of the early 1950s. Querelle (1982) was the final film by the controversial director

and German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

It was adapted from the 1947 novel Querelle of Brest by gay French writer Jean Genet. Warhol was particularly drawn to the film’s focus on desire and sex between men.

Exposure

By the 1970s, Warhol had become an international celebrity in his own right. He frequented the New York nightclub Studio 54, documenting its vivid and legendary scene. He was known to go out every night, cheekily referring to the habit as his “social disease.” Such exposure allowed him to construct a distinctive and widely recognizable public identity. It generated essential publicity for his work, which in turn financed his more experimental artistic practices.

Karen Kain (1980)In 1983, Toronto lawyer William Hechter commissioned Warhol to portray Canadian ballet dancer Karen Kain. The artist produced four paintings, three drawings, and a silkscreen edition that was sold in support of the National Ballet of Canada. Following his usual approach to celebrity commissions, Warhol took multiple photographs of Kain with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He selected one image, enlarged it, and converted it into a halftone negative. That negative became the basis for the three paintings shown below and, ultimately, for this vividly coloured silkscreen. Warhol added “diamond dust” to the print, accentuating the radiance of this star of the Canadian stage.

Warhol/Beuys (1980)
German artist Joseph Beuys was one of Warhol’s contemporaries. Although they were never close friends and their styles differed, each admired the other’s work. Both approached mass media critically, and both worked in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp by making art from everyday objects.This poster advertised a joint exhibition of their work in Naples in 1980. Beuys sits uneasily on the edge of the Fountain of Neptune, awkwardly holding Warhol’s hand. With understated humour, Warhol extends his other hand into the mouth of a ferocious stone lion. Beuys signed the poster and cheekily added a top hat to the lion. The image testifies to Warhol’s enduring interest in collaborating with other artists.

Statue of Liberty (1986)

Warhol created many works featuring the Statue of Liberty. The monument had personal significance for him: when his family immigrated to the United States, they landed at nearby Ellis Island. His depiction of this icon can be seen as the ultimate celebrity portrait. The robed, torch-bearing, crowned woman is one of the world’s most famous symbols of freedom.

In Statue of Liberty, Warhol overlays the monument with military camouflage. In the lower-left corner, he reproduces the logo of the French biscuit company Fabis, which commissioned the work to mark the centenary of the statue’s arrival in New York. Warhol’s depiction of liberty can be read as a comment on the status of freedom during the Cold War, when relations were tense between the United States and communist countries such as the Soviet Union and China.

Sewn Photographs

Between 1982 and 1987, Warhol joined multiple copies of his photographs together. They were stitched on a sewing machine by Michele Loud, a fashion student and seamstress who worked at the Factory during the 1980s. Some works portrayed friends such as singer Grace Jones; others offered experimental depictions of the male nude. Warhol exhibited them in the United States shortly before his death, earning his best reviews in years. Like his Pop works of the 1960s,

these sewn photographs continued to employ such characteristic Warhol devices as repetition and the grid.

Anatomy Class (1986)

Cadaver (1986)

In these repeated, stitched photographs, a bearded man in a white coat and white gloves holds up a cadaver’s limb. The body appears to have been stripped of its skin and may be decomposing. Something that looks like flesh dangles gruesomely around his fingers.

Two women, possibly students, stand to his right and observe, though one appears to be turning away. Repeating the photograph draws attention to its composition and its pattern of light and dark areas. In this work, Warhol also questions our voyeuristic fascination with death and human tragedy.

Cough (1986)

In this work, a handwritten notice in a New York taxi tells passengers that the driver can provide cough medicine if anyone needs it. Repeating the image emphasizes the strange and unexpected things we so often encounter in daily life.

The work may also have held personal meaning for the artist. Childhood illness had a lasting effect on Warhol’s health. As an adult, he suffered from hypochondria and was acutely alert to signs of germs as he moved through the city. This fear of illness occasionally surfaced in his art.

Celebrity Portraits

“They all have to be the same size so they’ll fit together and make one big painting called Portrait of Society. That’s a good idea, isn’t it? Maybe the Metropolitan Museum will want it someday?”
—Andy Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol: The Headshots (2000)
By the 1970s, Warhol saw himself as the head of Andy Warhol Enterprises. Following his “business art” model, he employed an assortment of assistants and delegated the production of commissioned portraits at his Union Square studio. His manager, Fred Hughes, secured commissions from wealthy clients.
Some regarded the made-to-order portraits produced by Warhol and his studio in the 1970s and 1980s as little more than a way to make money. Yet Warhol also used their standardized techniques, formats, and
dimensions to critique celebrity itself. By giving every portrait the same basic features, he suggested that the varied personalities driving the sports and entertainment industries were ultimately interchangeable. Warhol understood celebrity as a mask behind which a person could hide—an idea conveyed by the rigid, polished poses adopted by many of his sitters.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1983)
Warhol met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe through Interview editor Bob Colacello, a close friend of Warhol’s. Mapplethorpe admired Warhol, who was eighteen years his senior, and considered him the greatest living artist.
The two had much in common: both were gay men who explored queerness and sexuality through art, and both helped establish New York City as a major centre of the contemporary art world. During the 1980s, they made portraits of one another. Here Warhol presents Mapplethorpe as photography’s “bad boy.” Wearing a leather jacket and a 1950s-style Teddy Boy haircut, Mapplethorpe stares directly at the viewer.

Gun (1981)
Death became a recurring theme in Warhol’s work during the 1960s, particularly in his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and his Death and Disaster series.
Warhol’s fear of his own death intensified after Valerie Solanas shot and gravely wounded him in 1968. The gun repeated across these two canvases closely resembles the snub-nosed .22-calibre pistol Solanas used. Complications related to the shooting ultimately contributed to Warhol’s death in 1987.

The Final Years

Warhol’s art became more overtly political during the 1980s. One of his principal concerns was the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
As a devout Catholic, Warhol was also interested in the waning authority of the Catholic Church in North America.
Alongside works addressing these issues, Warhol revisited his own image in the 1980s, producing for a London exhibition the self-portraits later known as the Fright Wig series. He had begun wearing wigs in the 1950s to conceal his thinning hair, but by the 1980s they served more than a cosmetic purpose. Warhol asked his wigmaker, Paul Bochicchio, to help attach unruly platinum-blond and silver hair to his head, transforming him into a commanding figure who evoked fear and death.

Camouflage (1986)
Soldiers traditionally wear camouflage to blend into their surroundings—usually an earth-toned pattern designed to conceal them among soil and trees. Ironically, because camouflage is so closely associated with the armed forces, it is also instantly recognizable. That obvious contradiction appealed to Warhol, with his fascination for brands and trademarks. His vividly coloured transformations of the pattern pointedly defeat camouflage’s practical purpose. In one image, the pattern becomes a red, white, and blue simulation of patriotism, offering a wry Cold War commentary on the militarization of American society.

Crosses (1981)

Self-Portrait (1986)Warhol made his first self-portrait in 1964 and continued portraying himself throughout his life. This work belongs to a series created shortly before his death at his studio at 22 East 33rd Street in New York. He depicts himself with parted lips and a blank, cadaverous solemnity. The unruly wig atop his head seems to possess a life of its own, making clear how it earned the nickname “Fright Wig.”In his earlier self-portraits, Warhol appears young and detached. Here, his gaunt face and intense expression convey the suffering he had endured since the 1968 shooting. On February 22, 1987, Warhol died of heart failure in a New York hospital following gallbladder surgery.

I came away from the exhibition with a great deal to think about. The works spanned all four decades of Warhol’s career and touched on subjects ranging from consumerism and the classical art-historical tradition to his Catholic faith and New York City’s underground counterculture.

The exhibition introduced me to his working-class Eastern European immigrant background, his religion and sexuality, and the extraordinary turns in his life—from his years as an illustrator to the shooting. I came to understand how profoundly all these details shaped both his life and his work.

The exhibition brought Warhol into much fuller view, yet the man himself remains as enigmatic as ever, with countless mysteries still unresolved.

Notes: 1. Passages shown in grey are brief translations based on the AGO’s exhibition texts and may not convey their original meaning fully or accurately. 2. The photographs were taken at the exhibition. Copyright remains with the relevant institutions and original creators.

A Visit to the AGO’s 2021 Andy Warhol Retrospective

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