Warhol A to B and Back Again: What are the critics saying?

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article.

“The Whitney show vividly restores him to full, commanding view, and reasserts his importance for a new generation, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way.”

“I never thought I’d use the word exalted for Warhol, or transcendent, or sublime.”

“Namely, that if one were to ask people on the street—with no link to, or active interest in art—if they know of Andy Warhol, the majority would. No other artist has crossed over from the art world to so successfully inhabit the wider cultural landscape.
Warhol understood the machinations by which his art—and the environment he constructed around him—could be commodified to topple distinctions between the domestic and the public”

“The artist remains pertinent because, through his appetite for consumption and dissemination, he ​became​ the information, the culture, and the machinery that so fascinated him, and which everyone now increasingly trades in on a daily basis.”

page1image46095264page1image46093600

 

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article.

“He foresaw the era of celebrity. He foresaw the eradication of the divide between high and low art. He foresaw that one day people would machine-gun their grandmothers to gain a thimbleful of notoriety. He lived then, but he understood now.”

page2image46120592page2image46121168

 

“It knits together the wildly divergent career of one of the world’s most important artists, and affirms his significance in the here and now.”

“He almost single-handedly yanked serious art back from abstraction to the visceral reality — urgent, violent, repeated — of the world.”

 

page2image46124912

“There is something in his work that speaks to our contemporary culture,”

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article.

“If Duchamp, in drawing a moustache on the most famous sitter of all time, playfully sought to undermine the pedestals and canons of art history, Warhol’s take feels less iconoclastic, and transforms the painting anew. This riveting, unexpected exhibition allows us to see this most familiar of post-war artists through similarly fresh eyes.”

 

page3image46089440page3image46096096

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article.

“He’s able to somehow bring together the world of popular culture and the world of art. [He shows us] that somehow we’re looking at a painting, but we’re [also] looking at a painting about something: an object [or] a brand that’s trying to get us to believe something, to buy [into] it.”

“Warhol is, by far, the most popular American pop artist of the 20th century. No private or museum collection is complete without his work, and the themes he addresses remain hugely relevant. The ever-increasing popularity of Warhol demonstrates how much his work still means to people.”

page4image46098800page4image46099424

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article.

 

page5image46099632page5image46100464

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article.

page6image46097968

“But if he truly believed that he had nothing to offer but flimflam — that his art was merely a pretty pastime — he would have hated the Whitney show. Because De Salvo has amassed conclusive evidence that Warhol possessed the one quality he spent a career avoiding: depth.”

The Whitney Museum in New York opened the first US retrospective for Andy Warhol in over 30 years. Curated by Donna De Salvo, the show aims to reconsider the career of Warhol and to have the viewer take a critical look at Warhol’s work, but also to challenge the viewer’s own assumptions of Warhol’s oeuvre. Click any logo below to access the full article

.

page7image46100256

 

“Warhol remains so present in our culture it may seem perverse that it has been nearly 30 years since there was a museum show devoted to him. In the intervening years, the media has become its own museum, and Warhol’s images remain thoroughly, eternally, consumed and consumable.”

“These are unexpected postscripts to a blockbuster exhibition, quieter artifacts that remind us, vitally, that Andy Warhol was so much more than soup tins, Jackie O, and Brillo boxes—and the loud celebrity that they brought him.”