Was there a celebrity subject better-suited to Andy Warhol than Elizabeth Taylor? And was there an artist better-suited to the Gagosian Gallery than Andy Warhol? The gallery’s show of Warhol’s paintings of the actress, called Liz, is a perfect concoction. The paintings capture her different incarnations: child star, adult temptress, and over-exposed yet still-unknowable celebrity. There are, across the gallery’s back wall, seven canvases from the iconic headshot series. The color fields in each one, applied across a black silkscreen, are in comic book shapes and hues that flatten the actress’ legendarily fine features. There’s no depth to them, pictorially or emotionally. They’re not portraits, they’re just pictures.
On the right-hand wall of that gallery are some remarkable canvases I’ve never seen before, a series of black-on-silver prints of that same headshot. (Two of them are visible in this view.) They’re something entirely different from the colored paintings. They aren’t silkscreened with the same cool professionalism. Some are blurry, some are too dark, and some aren’t centered on the canvas. One, which captures the fiery life in Taylor’s eyes, has been cropped from the bottom so violently that it seems to fall off the canvas. The imperfections give these images an incredible gravity, an effect that’s amplified when one remembers the actress’ passing last year. These are elusive, unstable images that don’t ever really come into focus. Like Warhol’s paintings of the electric chair and a mourning Jackie Kennedy, they are images of death.
