Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies, 1964 acrylic
This piece is one that I really like. The title for it is pretty self-explanatory because the women depicted is obviously Jacqueline Kennedy and it’s done sixteen times. The top and bottom row are images Andy Warhol took from Life magazine of her right before her husbands assassination. The two middle rows are also taken from life magazine but after the assassination. It was common for Warhol to appropriate images of famous celebrities for his prints. It is a very common postmodern strategy. It was also common for pop artists to use everyday objects in their work, which was also a big part of the postmodern movement. In this case the images were common for the time because the assassination had such a huge effect on our nation. I sometimes have a problem with refusal of mastery but in Warhols work it has never really seemed to bother me. I actually never even thought about it until it was just recently brought up. In my opinion I guess it just seems to go kind of unnoticed because he does such good work with color. In this piece the blue works very well to convey a sort of tragic feeling to the viewer.
www.walkerart.org
I agree how refusal of mastery never really makes its way into conversation within Warhol's work. All of his pieces seem so fluid - due to his almost natural sense of color in design - that each of his works that has been appropriated seems on its own, and unique in that aspect.
ReplyDeleteHmm, very interesting thought. While there certainly is a looseness and graininess to the Warhol prints, I have never really considered Warhol's work to be exhibit a 'refusal of mastery' in the same sense of say, Wegman's early video work. Maybe that's because it has that 'just lifted from the news' feeling... Good point. Now Jesse, could you include a little external information for us here to shore up your writing/argument? What about a comparison to other Warhol works, or another critic's interpretations.
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to an entire issue of October dedicated to Warhol with some interesting insights about the origin of his serial paintings...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19400549/Andy-Warhol-October-Files