Home > Paintings of Andy Warhol

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Seems that the salient metaphysical question lately is "Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans?" The only available answer is "Why not?" The subject matter is a cause for both blame and excessive praise.

Actually it is not very interesting to think about the reasons, since it is easy to imagine Warhol's paintings without such subject matter, simply as "overall" paintings of repeated elements. The dead-pan, sweet, know-nothing quality of Andy Warhol's personality is continuous with his paintings. He plays dumb just as his paintings do, but neither deceives us. The paintings are of canned, commercial images, whether Campbell Soup, Marilyn Monroe, or of scenes of destruction and death, an auto crash, an electric chair. The image always has a context and a history before Warhol uses it: he takes the second-hand or the familiar and presents it freshly, with immediacy.

The feelings Andy Warhol's paintings evoke in us are socially ordained, the forms of feeling and the expression are what our popular society has evolved and superimposed: there is meant to be little ambiguity in our response. It is here that Warhol knows something he isn't telling. There is no image so simple that it means only one thing, no image so familiar that it has lost its meaning. The impact grows through repetition, the forms dissolve into patterns on the canvas, then regroup in fresh recognition.

There is little casual in the apparently casual art of Andy Warhol. He searches through the magazines and newspapers for images that carry the directness and submerged ambiguity that are his subject matter. A silk-screen is ordered, of a certain size, never the size of the original photograph. The image is then repeated a certain number of times, on a canvas of determined size. The canvas is either left white or painted a uniform background color, or several canvases with backgrounds of different colors are mounted together.