Recap: Getting the Picture of Andy Warhol’s Work, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Yet as artworks, a lot of the political portraits here are real potboilers, made on commission to appease the vanity of the subjects. They are also the sort of work that was responsible for a decline in Warhol’s reputation in later years; he was widely accused of having become a latter-day “court painter” for hire. I am afraid I have to agree.

Photographs of one kind or another provide the source material for many of the portraits. Sharon Matt Atkins, curator of the exhibition, makes this clear in display cases that contain newspaper cuttings, Polaroids and other photographic images from the artist’s studio archives. This gives the show an added depth of meaning and purpose and nicely connects it to the snapshot imagery in the other exhibition.Elsewhere, the show parades famous faces from American and international politics of the 1970s and ’80s. There are silk-screen and screen-print portraits of Presidents Kennedy, Carter and Reagan, Golda Meir, Nancy Reagan, Mario Cuomo, Nelson Rockefeller, Edward Kennedy and an assortment of European and African members of royalty, all done in the artist’s direct, illustrative style in loud Day-Glo colors.

Happily, the second Warhol show, “Andy Warhol: Pop Politics,” contains a great many works of art, some of them quite good, like a set of six silk-screen paintings of Jackie Kennedy from 1964, and a classic silk-screen portrait of Chairman Mao, dated 1972-74. The latter work is part of a whole series of famous portraits of Mao, several of which are showing here, clustered in a back room, produced by Warhol after President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

But as interesting as these might be to Warhol fans, it is hard not to wonder about their historical value as art. After all, aren’t we just looking at the idle snapshots of a famous artist? Does his fame mean that every image he ever made with a brush or camera should be treated as a work of art? I think we need to draw a distinction between art and paraphernalia, and to my mind a lot of these snapshots probably fall into the latter category.While the Polaroids have a great deal to say about the artist’s overall approach to portraiture, the black-and-white prints are more interesting. Because they were made with no immediate purpose in mind, they retain an alluring spontaneity, recording aspects of the artist’s life and activities, ranging from groups of friends at lunch or dinner parties to the fold of a woman’s dress. One even shows the interior of a clothes closet.

No doubt many of these Polaroids were produced as studies for the commissioned silk-screen portraits of glamorous patrons that Warhol cranked out in the last two decades of his life, and for which he has been roundly criticized. In style they are all fairly conventional, capturing the face and upper torso of the subject. They look like passport photographs.

Two types of photographs predominate: small color Polaroids and larger 8-by-10 black-and-white prints. The Polaroids document the artist’s wide and illustrious social circle, with images of athletes like Dorothy Hamill, celebrities like Dolly Partonand Diana Ross, the designer Yves Saint Laurent and the Baron Philippe de Rothschild.

The 50 pictures in the snapshot exhibition date from the 1970s and ’80s, and were selected from a larger gift to the museum of more than 150 photographs by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The gift was part of an extraordinarily generous donation of Warhol’s art to college and university art museums across the United States in 2008.Warhol was an obsessive photographer. He not only took photographs of the rich, famous and beautiful, but also documented the myriad aspects of his daily life. In the catalog of the “Andy Warhol: Snapshots” exhibition, Michael Lobel, the curator, writes that Warhol took at least one roll of film a day over the course of the last decade of his life. (He died on Feb. 22, 1987.)

It is sometimes useful to analyze artwork on the basis of the artist’s biography. But with Warhol, it is almost mandatory, because his art is inseparable from his life. Some critics have even said that his life was his greatest work of art, for by the mid-’60s he was already as famous for his blond wigs and party-on lifestyle as he was as an artist.

According to the New York Times, It is hard to know quite what to make of Andy Warhol’s snapshots, the subject of one of two modest but nonetheless interesting exhibitions devoted to the late prince of Pop at the Neuberger Museum of Art. The other show, organized by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., focuses on the artist’s portraits of political leaders. The two shows, which together contain more than 110 works, most lesser-known, are basically unrelated. They are linked only by Warhol’s fascination with the rich, powerful and famous, whom he courted throughout his life; he even published a celebrity magazine, Interview, that tracked the lives of stars.
Getting the Picture of Andy Warhol’s Work