Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 21, 1991 TAG: 9104190271
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANN WEINSTEIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To do so, he not only borrowed imagery from the popular culture found in the mass media; he applied the basic premises of a consumer society to art. With a certain irony, he promoted multiples as a prestigious commodity appropriate for mass consumption. He also used commercial printing techniques found in advertising and the repetition found in mass production.
As radical as Warhol was, he never relinquished the old-fashioned art virtues of representation; shallow, cubist space; and definitive, incisive drawing - an art in itself that is becoming deplorably lost. Some of the lines are mechanical instead of edgy or personal. But all are firm, fluid, totally assured and convincing.
"Andy Warhol: Works From the Cochran Collection," at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, provides an incredible opportunity to see the work of this seminal artist. This is not the first time a Warhol show has been available in our area, but due to escalating costs it may be the last.
This is a small show composed of the artist's later work. But it covers more than a decade, enough to observe Warhol's ideas as defined by variations contained within the chosen limitations of his format. All the works but one are silkscreen prints, a technique Thomas Jones, director of the museum, says Warhol and other Pop artists "elevated to the level of fine art."
Warhol appropriated popular icons and topical events as subject matter: a speed skater, an astronaut on the moon, Mick Jagger, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse - one more star set against the background of a dark, glittery firmament. The stuff of the American dream expressed in pop terms.
Although the subjects are simple, their underlying concept was revolutionary and their execution sophisticated. Donald Duck appears in two prints, one of which is enhanced by added dry brush marks exactly duplicated in the printed version. (If technique, as claimed, is a mark of sincerity, that would be the ultimate irony of Warhol's supposed detachment).
The figure in "Moonwalk" (the series Warhol was working on when he died in 1987) is laid in with flat shapes of autonomous color and barely modeled with linear movement. The window of the astronaut's helmet is portrayed as a television set lit with unintelligible electronic blips. Large smooth blocks of color are laid in behind the straining, thrusting figure of "Speed Skater."
In the sustained series "Cowboys and Indians," "Geronimo" looks funny instead of fierce. Brandishing a gun and wearing a 10-gallon hat, John Wayne looks soppy instead of soulful. General Custer looks more pensive than decisive. Everything is subtly distorted to challenge perceptions.
Warhol created himself as well as his art. He said he wanted to be a machine. But as his work reveals, he understood his time perfectly, and was equally ambivalent about it. In fact, his apparent neutrality is the biggest subversion of all.
Thirty years after Warhol first appeared on the scene, there are plenty of people who still feel threatened by him and - according to their own values - they may well be right. If the viewer is a traditionalist, in art or life, Warhol is the bearer of hostile news. If the viewer feels alienated, he or she may well feel confirmed by him.
The show runs through May 4. The Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, 975 Main St., is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m.
"Dual Images," Kendall Kessler's exhibit at North Cross School in Roanoke, is a very effective teaching device. It provides insight into the process of making choices that all artists are faced with, not only in medium and size, but in the arrangement of the basic formal elements of art.
It also demonstrates that even the most realistic image is, to quote from Kessler's artist's statement, "an abstraction from nature." Even the most realistic description is not the thing itself, but the artist's idea of the thing, or the thing as a vehicle for the artists's ideas.
All of the works are presented in sets of two, the same still life or landscape painted to very different effects. Generally, the first images are brighter, less intense and obviously preliminary. More heavily layered and emphatically defined, the second images (as indicated by their titles) are more developed, theatrical and sometimes tinged with the ominous.
There are exceptions. "Wordsworth Avenue" and the much smaller "Wordsworth Avenue, Again" are fairly similar in effect. The watercolor "Near Reed's" is much more lucid than the second version, done in oil pastel. The preliminary pastel and ink version of "West Virginia Atmosphere," colorful but airless, and the charcoal version, "West Virginia, Again," reverse the expected order in drawing. Black and white usually precedes color.
The show runs through April 30. The Living Gallery, North Cross School, 4254 Colonial Ave., is open during school hours.
by CNB