Andy Warhol

9 The Present and Future Warhol

In the years since Andy Warhol’s death his reputation and the financial value of his art has increased exponentially. In 2001 the Warhol Museum organized 39 shows and loans of his work. A recent touring exhibition of his work visited Eastern Europe, making Warhol the first modern American artist to have his work shown in Latvia and Kazakhstan.

The Warhol Foundation has struck various licensing deals which mean that Warhol images now appear on everything from scarves to plates to stationery to martini glasses to hot-water bottles. The US post office is planning to issue a stamp with one of his photobooth self-portraits on it.

When Warhol’s works come up at auction they regularly set record prices. In 1998 Orange Marilyn sold for $17.3 million, while $2.3 million dollars is the current going rate for a small electric chair silk-screen.

Of course, none of this in itself says much about whether or not Warhol is a great artist, but what it certainly does mean is that his work continues to connect with a mass audience as well as with the connoisseurs and taste-makers of the art world. He continues to be seen as current and relevant.

The discovery that Warhol had been a practising Catholic at the end of his life, combined with the many works of art he made from Leonardo’s Last Supper has led to some debate about the extent to which he was a ‘spiritual’ artist. The question is a difficult one. If we understand the word spiritual simply to mean a concern with things beyond the merely physical and material, then ‘spiritual art’ would once have seemed a tautology. If a painting wasn’t in some sense spiritual, then it probably wasn’t art; it was just paint.

But then we remember Warhol’s recommendation that if we want to know all about Andy Warhol and his art we should just look at the surface of his work, that there is nothing behind it. There are plenty of modern artists who would share this emphasis on the material nature of art, and yet this doesn’t quite describe the experience of looking at an Andy Warhol painting. One doesn’t think, ‘Here’s a canvas that looks like a soup can, but actually it’s just paint’, any more than one does when looking at Leonardo’s Last Supper. Rather one is inclined to think, ‘Here’s an image of a soup can, or a dollar bill, or Marilyn Monroe, that clearly has a material existence but which also allows me to perceive the subject in a way I never quite have before.’

In that sense Warhol’s best work is not merely spiritual, it is actually transcendent. It not only allows us to see eternity in a grain of sand, but to see it in a Coke bottle or a can of soup. In Warhol’s work, as William Burroughs put it;

“…a soup can, seen with a clear eye, can be as portentous as a comet.” (Warhol, 1989).

Andy Warhol has cleared all our eyes.