MUNICH.- Yes!Yes!Yes! Warholmania in Munich is a collaboration between the
Museum Brandhorst and Filmfest München, featuring the painterly and cinematic work of Andy Warhol. In the sheer prolificacy of his creative output, Warhols legacy extends far beyond the realms of painting and film, and permeates an array of artistic and social areas. At various stages in his career he was a commercial artist, book illustrator, music producer; he founded a lifestyle magazine, Interview, still in circulation today, and launched his own TV show in the 1970s (well before MTV), with which he managed to capture the spirit of punk and new wave. As a result, Warhol ended up simultaneously becoming the darling of high art and mass taste, auctions and subculture. This exhibition and the accompanying programme of events lift the veil on the entire spectrum of Andy Warhols work, which has permanently altered our understanding of art.
For the first time in its history, the Museum Brandhorst is presenting its entire collection of works by Andy Warhol in one go to mark Yes!Yes!Yes! Warholmania in Munich. With well over 100 works, the Museum Brandhorst boasts one of the most important Warhol collections in the world. In a series of rooms arranged both chronologically and by theme, the exhibition traces the key developments in his work. Starting with drawings and book illustrations from the 1950s and ending in the 1980s with his late work in diverse media, Yes!Yes!Yes! Warholmania in Munich is retrospective in character.
Warhols early drawings, which are shaped by his experience as a commercial artist, are presented alongside a selection of artist books from the same period, made in his capacity as a budding fine artist rather than a commercial one. Warhols Liz (1964) and Marilyn (1967) and other iconic images of the 1960s reveal his lifelong fascination with the glitter and glamour of the celebrity cult but also its dark underbelly. His fascination for the latter can be inferred by the timing of the paintings creation: he only decided to make his first Marilyn, for example, after she had committed suicide.
This aspect of his work comes to the fore in the Death and Disaster series, of which the Museum Brandhorst has an outstanding example in Mustard Race Riot (1963). Media images of the race riots in Birmingham, Alabama were arranged in sequence on the monochrome canvas.
Warhol revolutionized the medium of painting by using images culled from advertising and magazines as subjects for his paintings. The pivotal moment in this development was Warhols pioneering use of the silkscreen printing process in the early 1960s, which profoundly undermined the hitherto clear distinction between high art and commercial art, not to mention the question of original versus copy. This technical innovation marked the start of a period of great experimentation in Warhols work that would continue into the 1970s. This experimentation is evident in the elaborately collaged silkscreen prints of the Ladies and Gentlemen series (1975), based on Polaroid source images of transvestites taken by Warhol himself. Their faces, reproduced using the mechanical silkscreen process, are highlighted by shreds of brightly coloured paper ripped-out by hand, which roughly correspond to sections of the faces. The incongruity of the abstract and figurative forms gives rise to oversized mouths and near-grotesque eyes, and emphasizes the masquerade of life as a transvestite. In their fixation on the artificiality of appearance, the transvestites were for Warhol icons of the time, actors in an abyssal role play that knew no end, and which, unlike that of the stars they were so keen to impersonate, could only be played out at the very fringes of society.
The exhibition takes a special look at Warhols artistic treatment of abstraction. The way he approached abstraction was always in clear contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, the generation of artists immediately before him. A whole room is dedicated to his Shadow Paintings of the late 1970s dark and seductive images of shadows cast by undefinable objects that take his desire to empty his canvases of signs to the extreme. The Camouflage Paintings (1986) and giant Oxidation Painting (1978), in which he ironizes the Abstract Expressionists credo of the gesture being an extension of the artists inner self, are displayed in the context of Warhols expanded artistic practice of the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, Warhol had risen to become the court painter of the art and fashion world, and he pointedly marketed his star portraits to win possible new commissions. The portraits of (more or less important) figures of his time for example art dealer Pat Hearn are a testament to his fascination with the phenomenon of celebrity, as are the groundbreaking television broadcasts from the years 1979 to 1987, which are also shown here in part. Especially in these two groups of works, his fascination and obsession with surface, appearance, and self-stylization can be most acutely perceived and is reflected in the ironic, expressive gestures of the large-canvas paintings of his later years.
The show also features a screening of Lupe (1965), a two-channel film projection that revolves around one of Warhols muses: Edie Sedgwick in the role of Mexican actress Lupe Vélez. Vélez was a flamboyant Hollywood actress of the 1930s and 1940s who took her own life at the age of 36 while pregnant. As with his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, what attracted Warhol to Vélez in his film Lupe was not just her star persona, but also her life story, which culminated in the tragic image of her suicide. This dark side to Andy Warhols art also forms the conceptual backdrop for the collection display Dark Pop, which traces Warhols pivotal position in the history of Pop Art and Neo-Pop, on the entrance level of Museum Brandhorst.
The museum is handing over its small media room to Glenn OBrien, one-time close assistant and colleague of Andy Warhol. OBrien, former member of Warhols Factory and first editor of Interview, started his own TV show on a public-access cable channel in 1978, just before Andy Warhol launched his own show. Glenn OBriens TV Party ran until 1982 and was conceived in the traditional mode of a late-night talk show, complete with studio band and guests. Snippets from selected shows will be screened in the museum. In addition to its list of illustrious guests including David Bowie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Iggy Pop, and Steven Meisel the allure of TV Party was down to its breaking of countless TV conventions. People were seen smoking joints in front of the camera, the live performances usually had a very improvised feel, and the show itself was clearly anything but scripted. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this fact, the broadcast achieved something entirely new. It reached a large audience one otherwise beyond its creators grasp with a wilfully subversive television format that simultaneously fundamentally broadened the publics understanding of art. As such, OBriens programme shared many key ideas with Warhols own approach.