If you head to the Met’s exhibit Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years searching for the ways Warhol provoked and liberated other artists, you’ll find it. But the show might be most compelling as a summation of Warhol’s own work. It includes pieces from all phases of his career, and it’s far more compact and energetic than a blockbuster. There are, in a string of small second-floor galleries beside the museum’s European master paintings, some of the artist’s Greatest Hits: a soup can, Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, two Marilyns, an Elvis, portraits, and cow wallpaper. Each one displays Warhol’s graphic virtuosity, and seems to be orchestrated for maximum optical impact. There’s a small, square Marilyn, the size of an album cover, whose colors and shades are rendered with such pristine concentration that it’s like a piece of jewelry.
There are also, by Warhol, two Jackies, a car crash, and two electric chairs. These works have the same formal power as the happier ones. In fact Orange Disaster #5, a 3x5 grid of electric chairs against a burn-colored field, might be the finest piece in the show. Its scale (it’s the size of a double door), severe composition, and lush gradations stop you as you walk by. It’s majestic. These pieces tap a rich, darker strain, one the artist abandoned later to take on more deliberately superficial subjects like flowers and celebrity portraits. (When I asked a friend what might have caused this shift she deadpanned, “Drugs.”) The exhibit highlights these darker pieces by juxtaposing them with the work of contemporary artists who engaged political subjects. But Warhol’s fascination with death and violence seems entirely personal. These canvases are like emotional maps, looking into the head and the heart. While they’re brilliantly composed they’re gruesome and could not have been uncomplicated to execute. Did Warhol numb himself in order to silkscreen this image of a man dying in an ambulance accident, twice? I doubt he was interested in the irony of the circumstances, but in the man’s spectacular physical vulnerability. The artist completed most of these darker works in the early 1960’s, before the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. What would have happened if he’d kept on with it? Would we think of him today the way we think of Goya?