Another example of critical misunderstanding is the work of Andy Warhol. The media and provocative personality of the painter is certainly for many. We must return again to Marcel Proust's injunction and note the disastrous scope of any psychological analysis of an artist's work. We must forget the man and watch his paintings, his photographs, and his films.
Because this work is generally described, analyzed, judged without ever being looked at, it gives rise to two serious setbacks. It is presented, mostly by those who defend it, as the denunciation of a violent America, a social work - and this despite the constant denials of its author in this regard. Those who oppose it perceive it as the negation of the pictorial effort inherent in 20th century history. Most critics wonder whether it encourages a critical and subversive apprehension of mass culture and the power of image as a commodity or whether it merely participates in the domination of the economy on the field of reality. This kind of jargon questioning completely misses the essentials and reveals the difficulty, the very refusal to look. However, it is enough to see the constant plastic invention within his work in perpetual renewal and to pay attention to his use of color to see to what extent Warhol is first a great painter. He is one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century. He is the heir to classicism - in the sense given to this term by Eugenio d'Ors: an assumed discontinuity, stability, and the institution of stable rules, refusal of agitation, submission of baroque elements, simplicity.
The portraits of Andy Warhol, be it Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Beuys, Mick Jagger, Sigmund Freud, wealthy clients or himself, all meet the same requirement. Captured in a frontal pose, petrified by flats of color, devoid of any psychology, these paintings show the face and not the expression. This refusal of interpretation, of recognizable emotion, of aesthetics, of a truth behind the appearance, of an interiority, is found in many modern artists, in the theater of Robert Wilson, in the cinema of Robert Bresson or Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, in the plays of Samuel Beckett.
The impressive Mao series of 1972-1974 plays brilliantly with the tension between the sequencing of the screen-printed face, a sort of effigy, and the unfolding of the color which is no longer descriptive, but is shown in its moving depth.
Few artists have had such a profound relationship to the power of the image - the image as what makes effect instantly and which in every sense “dazzles” the one looking at it. In reality - and it is strange that this is not more often observed - the enthusiasm that has struck so many people in front of Warhol's work is due to the fact that he is one of the very few artists of the twentieth century to have touched this sacred register of image with extraordinary modesty.
Painting usually unfolds only by abandoning the image. It is in this sense that Matisse emphasizes: “A painting by Rembrandt, by Fra Angelico, a painting by a good artist, always arouses this kind of feeling of escape and elevation of mind. […] I do not conceive of a painting devoid of that quality. Otherwise, it is an image. “Modernity seeks to be faithful to this dimension named here by Matisse and which is not a plastic quality or a conceptual elaboration. The painting disappears as the image appears as copy, information, reproduction”.
Andy Warhol is one of the few modern painters to give the image another meaning. It is what gives to see and makes visible. Unlike most artists who have worked on the image - from Dalí to Magritte - she is never at home narrative and anecdotal.
The way Andy War, made his portraits is significant. He took about two hundred polaroids of the person he was looking to paint, chose one or even took elements of several he was assembling, transformed the color photo into black and white photo, enlarged it, made a screen screen screen and put on it colors, often outraged and artificial, with extreme care.
One of the most staggering aspects of War, is his use of color, which is entirely freed from his illusionist role. It means nothing more than the resonance of its radiation. In expressionist paintings, a face may be green - but the choice of this color depends to a large extent on the surprise that it is not flesh color. At Warhol, the face can be painted in all possible colors with a subtlety each time convincing and striking because the color does not have the function of imitatively coloring any support. Mao's face is sometimes yellow, pink, green, blue, barbed or as erased, but without any provocation. His brush stroke is shown in his gesture, in his materiality even without weighing. Thus in the best pictures, the gesture is independent of the image and reaches a readability that seems even greater than in Pollock.
The fact that Warhol often juxtaposes the same image - Marilyn Monroe, flowers or an electric chair - meets a plastic need. Repetition, as Gertrude Stein points out, leads to a hypnotic and disrealizing effect.
The subject of a Warhol painting is immediately recognizable, and yet, because of its repetition, the free use of color, the saturation effect of blacks, the quality of the texture of the canvas giving rise to strange opacities, it becomes a plastic event. We must take very seriously the statement of Warhol, so often misinterpreted, “if you want to know who I am, look at the surface of my paintings and my films. There is nothing behind. I read only the texture of the words. I see everything in this way, the surface of things, a kind of braille mental.” Warhol summarizes here the modern invention of upholding the work which is now pure flatness, rejecting transcendence, depth, conventional humanism and metaphysics.
