I have few heroes aside from Abraham Lincoln. One of those, as you may know, is Andy Warhol. Another is Peter Schjeldahl, among other things the art critic for the New Yorker and, above all, a truly superior writer. I was very pleased, therefore, to see Mr. Schjeldahl write the following about Mr. Warhol:
Series like “Shadows” (enigmatic images from an illegible photo), “Oxidation Paintings” (Apollonian beauty achieved with piss on copper emulsion), “Camouflage” pictures (marvels of color), dashing collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and sombre self-portraits stand up to the strongest art made by anyone else, anywhere, at the time. See it. Admit it.I do, I do, and that joyfully!
It had never occurred to me to check out what Schjeldahl (hey, can I call you Peter? No? Oh.) had to say about Warhol, but inspired by this clip I searched the New Yorker archive. In it I found another article, from 2002, this about a Warhol show at the Tate which I myself saw. (Since I have no idea what Schjeldahl looks like, it is possible that he and I were in the same room at the same time and in subsequent versions of this story I plan to state this as flat fact.) His comments on Warhol therein prove to me that our thinking is in close accord ("Like the Beatles—his nearest equivalent in another field—Warhol invested vernacular idioms with a timeless eloquence." Yes!). But then he says this:
The show ends with striking installations of his later works—vast camouflage patterns, monumental Rorschach blots, gloomy "Shadows," sparkling with diamond dust, rusty spatters of urine on copper emulsion, and silk screens of da Vinci's "Last Supper," as well as zesty collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat. But these pieces strike me more as ingenious ideas for painting than as satisfying works of art. They feel phoned in.
