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Friday, September 30, 2011

America’s Cultural Mirror: Through the Looking-Glass of Andy Warhol




By Cyn Rene’ Whitfield
The International Council of Museums (n.d.). To understand how a culture can be examined through art the essence of cultures lies within the walls of more than 17,500 art museums in the United States according to the American Association of Museums (2010) and more recently, virtually the number of museum websites in the United States may be greater than the combined number of museum websites in the rest of the world, according to  is important to know the definition of the medium. Art is a combination of interpretation, skill, training, and observation that capture influences of class, gender, race, economic status and ideas of truth (Stokstad, 2008).  The manner of representation, realism verses surrealism, are artistic expression of these influences and have been preserved in the works of artists like Leonardo DaVinci, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gough. Although the more hallucinatory Picasso expresses a warped superior view of reality through expressionism (Caws, 2004) he is still representative of a culture. Van Gogh in his portal of Starry Night (1889) was said to have believed as a socialist that modern life with all it’s social change and focus on progress alienated people from each others and themselves (Walther & Metzger (n.d.). Starry Night was said to be a communication of the emotional state of a time.
Art produces a greater emic perspective of a culture that relies on that culture to participate (Garland, 2010).  Both the artist and the viewer interpret and attach characteristics from within to define their meaningfulness. Conclusions through generalizations have less cultural dimensions according to Dutch psychologist, Geert Hofstede, (Varmer & Beamer, 2008).  It is this reason art serves as window to culture. Twentieth century pop artist Andy Warhol is once such portal.  In the fall of 1962, his exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York sold out. His silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell soup cans, dollar bills and Coke bottles established him as the ‘New Realist” in modern art. In an interview with Art Voices in December 1962 (Goldsmith, 2004), Warhol explained the strategies of elusiveness, passivity and mirroring that would serve him well in his art over the following twenty-five years. It is Warhol’s mirroring of American culture in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s that not only preserves a culture but it also is representative of how other cultures view us.
The 1960’s were turbulent times in American history from the civil rights movement, to the space race, to the assassination of a President. As we moved away from the conservative attitudes of the fifties a more youthful generation comprised of approximately seventy million children from the post-war baby boomers became teenagers and young adults (Lone Star College- Kingwood Library (1999). We began to experience art in colorful fashion, twentieth century surrealism wearable art (Baudot, 2001) and in architecture with the PanAm Building (now called the Met Life Building) and the completion of the Memorial Arch in Saint Louis. (Lone Star College- Kingwood Library 1999). More evident of the changing youthful times of the 60’s was seen in the new, young, Kennedy administration. The President and First Lady were a starch contrast to the Dwight and Mimi Eisenhower administration. John F. Kennedy was the youngest president ever elected in the United States. His charisma and fashionable glamorous wife, Jackie, quickly became American icons, a breath of fresh air, and a new beginning. But it wasn’t until after the assassination of her husband did Warhol produce the Jackie series. Warhol began his monotone silk-screened acrylic paintings in 1966 from images obtained from eight separate wire-service photos taken of Jacqueline Kennedy over the course of the November 22-25, 1963 (Lubin, D (2003). Warhol’s isolation and repetition of Jackie’s image in a comic-book like patchwork layout suggest both the solitary and collective experience of widow and witnessing nation. In Warhol’s own words…
“When President Kennedy was shot that fall, I heard the news over the radio while I was alone painting in my studio… I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart – but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad… It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.”  - Andy Warhol Exposures (1980 p. 60)
Art critiques interpret Warhol’s Jackie Collection as a repetitive reenactment of the assassination as viewers watched it unfold in the media. It was the first time that television had become a unifying force of a culture with viewers glued to their television sets. His style of mechanistic production and proliferation of an image was to show the dehumanizing effects of the media through parody (Bolinger, 2010) as it erodes the meaning and value of the subject matter. Warhol recalls that even after the Jackie Collection was displayed around the world viewers not only immediately recognized her in his prints they made sure not to come too close. “It was a telling portrayal of awe and respect for her”. (Warhol 1980 p. 82)  It is no wonder Warhol chose Jackie as a pop art subject matter. The term Pop Art comes from the term popular culture (Pixell77 2011) and Jackie Kennedy was indeed a persona.
Warhol chose another famous icon to make a similar statement about the media and times of the 1960’s with his most famous piece of Marilyn Monroe. His mechanistic reproduction of Monroe, like Jackie, and later those of Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Mao Tse-Tung, were statements of destruction by the machine of the media. 
His most identifiable series, The Campbell’s Soup Cans, are yet another approach to the same issue.  Although the series appears to be a replication of the same soup can he altered each one in such a subtle way that they must be examined in depth to see the differences. He would later use this same technique on dollar bills and images of Coke bottles.  His statement about American culture at the time was, “I just paint things I always thought were beautiful . . . things you use every day and never think about.” (Bockirs, V. 1997)
Although Warhol himself admits that most people in America think “Art” is a man’s name, art can be a portal for understanding and exploring a culture.  The works of Leonardo DaVinci, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gough, to name just a few, provide snapshots of a time realized.  American culture has also been conceptualized by artists of the times, like Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kincaid and Georgia O’Keeffe.  But the cultural subjective frame presented in the works of modern graphic artist Andy Warhol serve as a chronological timeline of American which carried a significant impact on the global workplace. His creations in the print, film and commercial venues immortalized American culture through four decades beginning in the 1960’s.  Throughout his career he captured the essence of American cultural icons and the mood of the times through vivid use of color and the subject matter he chose.  American culture is very diverse, but Warhol had a way of capturing a very representative sample of who we are and what we are during certain times.

REFERENCES 

American Association of Museums (2010) Retrieved September 23, 2011 from
http://www.aam-us.org/aboutmuseums/abc.cfm#how_many
Baudot, F. (2001) Fashion & Surrealism. Assouline Publishing. New York, NY
Bockris, V. (1997) Warhol; The Biography 75th Anniversary Edition. Da Capo Press. Cambridge, MA
Bolinger, Renee (2010) The Evangelical Post When Pop Art Gets Critical – Andy Warhol.  Retrieved September 24, 2011 from http://evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/2010/09/when-pop-art-gets-critical-andy-warhol.html
Caws, M.A. (2004) Surrealism. Phaidon Press. London
Garland, V.W. (2010)  Emic and Etic Perspectives in Contemporary American Art: The Paintings of Michael Ray Charles. Retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://www.vaughngarland.com/UnpublishedTexts/Emic%20and%20Etic%20Perspectives%20in%20Contemporary%20American%20Art%20The%20Paintings%20of%20Michael%20Ray%20Charles.pdf
Goldsmith, K. (2004) I’ll Be Your Mirror; The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews. Carroll & Graf Publishers. New York, NY
International Council of Museums. Virtual Library (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://museumca.org/usa/
Lone Star College- Kingwood Library (1999) American Cultural History. Retrieved September 24, 2011 from http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade60.html
Lubin, D (2003) Andy Warhol's Jackie II 1966 (Issue 4). The Berkeley Electronic Press. Retrieved September 24, 2011 from http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3429&context=cq&sei-redir=1#search=%22warhol%20jackie%20year%22
Pixell77 (2011). The Influence of Art History on Modern Design – Pop Art. Retrieved September 24, 2011 from http://www.pixel77.com/the-influence-of-art-history-on-modern-design-pop-art/
Stokstad, M. (2008) Art History Volume Two (3rd ed.). Pearson.Upper Saddle River, NJ
Varner, I. and Beamer, L. (2008) Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace (5th ed) McGraw Hil. New York, NY
Walther, I.F. & Metzger, R. (n.d.) Van Gogh; The Complete Paintings, Part I Etten, April 1881 – Paris, February 1888. Taschen America. Los Angeles, CA
Warhol, A. (1980) Exposures. Putnam Publishing Group. Kirkwood, NY
Warhol, A. (2005) Supernova; Stars, Deaths, and Disasters 1962-1964. Walker Art Center. Minneapolis, MN



ie Paintings. Retrieved September 24, 2011 from http://edu.warhol.org/aract_flashb.html