By Robert Brown

Fame, death and lurking in the shadows—more keys to unlock the enigma of Andy.






Andy Warhol was fascinated by celebrity. From his childhood scrapbook of Hollywood stars on, he was continually mesmerized by the glittery allure of the limelight surrounding the rich and famous. But he also sought to expose the shadowy underside of such fame and celebrity.

Understanding the shallow artifice, the corruptive power and the central role celebrity plays in a capitalist society fuelled by consumer desires, he both feared and desired fame. Always shy and uncomfortable in the spotlight himself, he carved out an existence in its shadows. He once said that he would like to be reincarnated 'as a ring on Liz Taylor's finger'—his ultimate wish was to dissolve his personality completely into the artificial surface glamour of his surroundings and to disappear as an individual. At parties he would stand by the wall trying not to engage in conversation but just to passively observe all that went on around him.
His movies did exactly the same thing, while his mechanically produced silkscreen paintings emphasize the iconic power of the shallow two-dimensional image. His famous statement that 'if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am, there's nothing behind it' also reflects his vision of the modern world as a glittery veneer permeated only by the dark ever-present reality of death.

This element of his art is probably best expressed in his last series of self-portraits from 1986, portraying himself as a flat luridly colored 'fright-wigged' creature splattered over an infinite expanse of pure black. It is, however, present throughout his multi-faceted oeuvre. In his rare and remarkable painting, Cagney, Warhol created a work that combines all his central issues. Cagney completes Warhol's triumvirate of male Hollywood stars—the other two being his macho and slightly camp portraits of Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley.

Cagney is also the first work to display Warhol's fascination with gangsters and, at the same time, his interest in the theme of violence in America, which developed into his celebrated Death and Disaster series. Depicting a defiant and cornered James Cagney from 1931's The Public Enemy, Cagney is a portrait of the ultimate anti-hero, capturing the essence of America's fascination with the gun and with the mobster several years before Hollywood capitalized on it with movies such as Bonny and Clyde and The Godfather.

For Warhol, gangsters represented a sinister underside to American celebrity. This is exposed in his F.B.I's Most Wanted Men. And his Death and Disaster paintings show ordinary anonymous people becoming celebrities through violence and disaster such as car crashes or suicide. Warhol had realized while painting the Marilyn portraits that 'everything I was doing must have been Death'. The ultimate image from this interest in 'the American way of death' is undoubtedly his paintings of the electric chair, but Race Riot, his provocative portrayal of the violent repression of a Civil Rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama reflects another uniquely American form of violence. It takes no political stance, however—in his art as in his life Warhol remained staunchly aloof from all political issues.

Objectivity and indifference remained crucial to Warhol's attitude towards life and central to his artistic aesthetic. His films were made by just pointing the camera and allowing it to run so that it seemed to suck in reality like a vacuum cleaner. 'All my films are artificial,' Warhol explained, 'but then everything's sort of artificial. I don't know where artificial stops and the real starts.' This also reflected his life at the Factory—his appropriately named studio—where, surrounded by an assortment of assistants and hangers-on, actors, poor-little-rich-kids, transvestites and street urchins, Warhol became a passive observer at his own party. 'People thought it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around,' Warhol said, 'but that's absolutely backward, it was me who was hanging around them.' Photobooth, 1964, an early montage of self-portraits taken with his assistant Gerard Malanga and Philip Fagan, captures the frenetic atmosphere of creativity and adventure that permeated the Factory.

This carefree atmosphere abruptly stopped in 1968 when Warhol was shot. After that Warhol's art grew more sober. The quintessential series from the 1970 is the often over-looked but greatly significant Shadow paintings. These large seemingly abstract paintings define Warhol's attitude and aesthetic. His ambiguous relationship with celebrity had led to his trying to live on the edge of the spotlight—in its shadows—and indeed Warhol depicted himself as himself as a shadow in a 1978 self-portrait. The shadow, like Warhol, was almost invisible, seemingly nonexistent but clearly present and ultimately a defining characteristic of any form. It was the perfect vehicle to express himself and also create abstract art without departing from the imagery of the world of external reality.

Predominantly dark, seemingly abstract, intriguingly enigmatic, the Shadow paintings have often been interpreted as a brooding meditation on death, and therefore distinct from his other work. In reality they lie at its heart. 'I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish,' Warhol once mused, 'and everything could just keep going the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well actually, I'd like it to say, "figment".'


Robert Brown is a Researcher in the 20th Century Art Department, Christie's London.

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