Casually clad in summer clothes, a man strolls past the burning car without so much as a glance. Lying upside-down, the pulverised vehicle must already have incinerated anyone left inside. One of its occupants was flung out by the force of the crash; he hangs from a nail on a nearby telegraph pole, like the victim of a public execution. But the passer-by remains oblivious to this stricken figure as well.
Andy Warhol’s large silkscreen image, based on a newspaper photo and made in 1963, provides a powerful antidote to the clichéd idea that he merely celebrated rampant US consumerism. His reputation, as a prime initiator of Pop Art, still rests on the iconic early images of canned soup and Coca-Cola bottles. These brazen works, ranged in multiple ranks as if for sale on supermarket shelves, allied Warhol with mass marketing at its most shameless. And the classical columns on the façade of Edinburgh’s National Gallery complex have now been enclosed in cans of Campbell’s soup, jokily suggesting that the entire show will reinforce this aspect of his output.
Once we step inside, though, any such expectation is brutally denied. A wooden crate of Coke bottles confronts us, but they have all been spray-painted grey and look like ghosts. Nearby, a whole room called “Death and Disaster” rams home the darkest side of Warhol’s imagination. He once recalled how his friend Henry Geldzahler triggered this obsession as early as 1962, by laying out a copy of the Daily News on their lunch table. “That’s enough affirmation of life,” Geldzahler told Warhol, who looked down at the front page. The headline was “129 Die In Jet!” It swiftly became a big Warhol painting, followed by a remorseless succession of screenprints based on even more disturbing news photographs.
One photo, repeated four times, shows a foot crushed by a truck tyre. Others focus on a hospital operation and a gangster funeral – yet the most uncanny is called “Suicide (Silver Jumping Man)”. At first, nothing can be discerned here apart from smoke pouring out of a skyscraper. But then, quite suddenly, we notice the silhouetted figure plummeting through space with limbs on fire. It seems shockingly prophetic of the victims who fell from the World Trade Center’s twin towers nearly 40 years later. And the darkness of this image, blackened to the point of near-extinction, shows just how tragic Warhol’s art had now become.
As a result, it is difficult in the rest of this show to take Warhol’s boxes of Brillo soap pads and other consumer durables at face value. Even the Statue of Liberty, hand-copied from the packaging for a brand of French biscuits called Fabis, looks gloomy and sinister. So too does the dollar sign, skewered on its upright pole and apparently dripping rust-coloured liquid.
As the show proceeds, there is no escape from Warhol’s intimations of mortality. He once recalled that back in 1962, “it was Christmas or Labor Day – a holiday – and every time you turned on the radio they said something like: ‘Four million are going to die’.” Everywhere you look in this revelatory exhibition, curated with admirable insight by Keith Hartley, haunting faces loom.
Jackie Kennedy appears in a 1964 ensemble of 20 separate paintings, moving from sun-dappled happiness with her husband through traumatised grief to funereal dignity. Elvis Presley, posing as a gun-toting Hollywood cowboy, is seen full-length in triplicate like a bewildered drunk. But the most devastating is devoted to Marilyn Monroe, soon after her suicide. This monumental diptych, containing 50 images of her smiling features, asserts an unabashed high-gloss glamour only to deteriorate into monochrome smudges, alarmingly rubbed and fading fast from view.
After a while, this concentration on memento mori proved too gruelling even for Warhol himself. He turned instead to experimental film-making, and maybe found relief in gazing at the young Susan Sontag, Dennis Hopper and Edie Sedgwick, who bewitched Warhol with her energy and stylish magnetism. We see them all submitting to screen tests, exuding cool and cultivating the deadpan manner so prevalent in his finished, often interminable films. Mercifully, however, the urge to explore portraiture would not go away. By the 1970s he had returned to its challenges, deploying a more agitated kind of paint-work that matched Warhol’s renewed willingness to engage with his sitters in all their life-and-death complexity.
Liza Minnelli is among the most vibrant, gazing through mascara-heavy eyes and dazzling us with her outrageously glistening lips. Even so, Warhol’s heightened awareness of vulnerability could not be kept at bay for long. His mother Julia, to whom he was very close, seems to fade away in front of us. Juan Dubose hugs his boyfriend Keith Haring, and the two young men seem to bathe in a puce, ever-loving haze. At the same time, though, they appear overcome by a sense of transience. Their foreboding proved all too well-founded: Haring died of Aids at the age of 32.
As for Warhol, he dramatises an accurate admission of his own physical frailty in the 1978 “Self-Portrait (Strangulation)”. Produced exactly a decade after he was shot and severely wounded by Valerie Solanas, founder of Scum (Society for Cutting Up Men), this six-part work shows Warhol opening his mouth in a startled cry. A pair of anonymous hands close round his throat, perhaps signifying his grim realisation that he had never fully recovered from his injuries.
The culmination of his urge to explore death can be found in a sequence of large, uniformly gruesome skull paintings. Although Warhol was celebrated for his “anything goes” activities in The Factory, where his band The Velvet Underground seemed to embody permissiveness in all its forms, he remained a Catholic and attended church almost every Sunday.
The skull depicted, which he purchased in Paris, must have awakened memories of religious paintings studied during his youth in Pittsburgh. Strongly influenced by the local Ruthenian religious community, to which his émigré parents belonged, Warhol now portrayed himself with a leering skull perched on his head and shoulder. He looks stoical enough, maybe because it reminded him of a devout boyhood. But when he produced the paintings of an isolated skull, with teeth exposed in gruesome detail and deep shadows filling the eye-sockets, a harsher mood prevailed. Whether blood-red, putrefying green or Arctic white, these images are mesmeric. And each casts a shadow unsettlingly reminiscent of a baby.
Before his death in 1987, caused by post-operative complications after gall bladder surgery, Warhol was affected by the return of cold war tension and Ronald Reagan’s demonisation of Russia’s “Evil Empire”. Gleaming sentinel guns, camouflage patterns and paratrooper boots invade his art, along with an ominous map of the USSR with missile bases all carefully delineated.
So it is a relief to reach the exhibition’s end room and discover the whole space occupied only by “Silver Clouds”. Made of a material called Scotchpak and inflated with a mixture of helium and air, they float gently through the gallery and confuse us with astonishingly clear reflections of visitors and their surroundings. Back in 1968, Merce Cunningham used the Silver Clouds for his dance Rainforest. In Edinburgh, many of them seem determined to rise upwards and congregate beneath the lofty skylight. Up there, they resemble symbols of the resurrection, encouraging us to fantasise about escaping from the material world and hover, finally, among the stars.
Exhibition opens today at the National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, and runs until October 7, www.nationalgalleries.org. Sponsored by Bank of Scotland
