What revelations there are at the Met’s show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years aren’t about Warhol. They’re about the other fifty-nine artists, all Warhol-inspired, who’s work is featured. There are three Gerhard Richter paintings from the 1960’s that have the same superfine handling of paint and dreamy, blurred finish as the photo-realist work from the 90’s he's famous for. There are also some recent paintings by Luc Tuymans, whose spectral brushwork and coloring blunt their acrid politics. One 2005 portrait of Condoleeza Rice is rendered in a web of translucent, tissue-like layers that convey tenderness more than satire. These men paint magnificently.
But the most impressive of the other fifty-nine might be Sigmar Polke. From the handful of works collected here, dispersed in different galleries, he emerges as a singular voice. There’s a quilt on which the artist’s drawings and doodlings run against the patterns and piecing of fabric. It’s a rich, clotted surface that trumps both the pictorial and compositional pleasures of traditional painting. And there’s Plastic Tubs, which shows the things to us in workmanlike strokes and candy colors on a canvas that’s left largely, strangely blank. Polke’s quilt paintings prefigure the 80’s assemblages of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, which also combine discordant materials and images, but lack their all-out sensuality. Polke’s more conventional paintings, like Plastic Tubs, while fine, lack the ravishing surfaces of Richters’ and Tuymans’. Regardless of the medium Polke, like Warhol, remains supremely cool. He overturns expectations with wit and without winking.