How smart was Andy Warhol? Smarter than he looked, smarter than he claimed to be, and smart enough to remain fascinating, frustrating and even infuriating almost a quarter-century after his death.
“Warhol: Headlines,” which opens at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, is the museum’s first major exhibition devoted to the artist. It leaves no doubt about the curator’s point of view: Warhol was no irony-soaked provocateur mindlessly importing pop pizzazz into the sanctums of high art for pure shock value. He was strategic, intelligent and brilliantly adept at analyzing and indicting the world we live in today, a world he seemed to both predict and forge through games of representation we now know by the encompassing shorthand: Warholian.
As if to second that opinion, the Hirshhorn is also opening a major exhibition, “Andy Warhol: Shadows,” the first complete installation of a 102-part work that occupies almost an entire floor of the museum. The 1978-79 series, laid out in one long, almost 450-foot ribbon of color, repeats with subtle and sometimes radical variations a single, abstract design supposedly based on a photograph of a shadow. It shows Warhol covering his high-art flank, assuming the prerogatives, including the megalomaniac ambition of the artist with a capital A that he consistently claimed never to be.
Taken together, the two exhibitions might remove any lingering doubts about Warhol. But the paradox of Warhol is that even as you become convinced, yet again, that he was indisputably great, Warhol himself disputes your opinion. His most enduring artistic act may be that he will never let his own greatness rest as settled fact. His consistent, unbroken insistence that he was naïve, superficial, an intellectual void, a cynic with his eyes focused only on dollar signs, undermines his oeuvre from beyond the grave, in a maddening but brilliant final joke on the very idea of posthumous relevance.
The National Gallery survey focuses on works Warhol made in response to, or using visual elements of the news, from early, hand-sketched mock-ups of newspaper front pages in the late 1950s to the enormous 1981 triptych “Fate Presto,” three heroically scaled silk screens seen for the first time in the United States.
