Another You Tube Art Video Recommendation: Andy Warhol

To be more exact, the video I'm recommending is entitled "Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture."



True to its title, the video, almost 3 hours long even with the commercials taken out, goes into some detail in the story of Warhol's and his art and the effects of that art, from before his birth, before his parents had migrated from Slovakia to Pittsburgh, to 2002, 15 years after his death, when the program was released. Dozens of people are interviewed, including Andy's brothers James and Paul, and people who worked with Andy when he was a commercial artist, before he had transitioned to fine art, and employees of the Factory in its various incarnations, and collectors including Dennis Hopper, and artists of the New York New Wave whom Andy mentored, including Kenny Scharf and Julian Schnabel. Everybody except Lou Reed who was ever anybody: John Giorno, Billy Name, John Richardson, Mary Woronov, Paul Morrisy, John Cale, Udo Kier, Holly Woodlawn, Ultra Violet, Bob Colacello and other fabulous people all get their say.

I wonder why Lou isn't in the program.

Good insights are provided into all aspects of Andy's life. His brothers, who have sometimes been portrayed harshly in the media, as bumpkins and barbarians and whatnot, in this program just come off as regular guys from Pittsburgh who loved their fragile little brother -- loved him his whole life, and missed him after he was gone. We learn that Andy was beaten up by a girl in his first day at school (By a girl! Isn't that just perfect!) and came home crying. We learn that a couple of years later he was confined to bed for a while with illness -- and with a coloring book his Mom gave him (And isn't that just perfect too). The program delivers a very convincing narrative of how Andy developed from a sickly kid in Pittsburgh who adored Hollywood stars, to a very successful, high-paid graphic artist in New York -- who, unknown to most of his friends, lived with his mother, who cleaned his apartment, and, for example, cooked Campbell's soup for him -- to an artist who, for a few years, only precariously paid the rent, who then, as gay, sunny, witty Pop Art replaced melodramatic, macho, hetero Abstract Expressionism in the early 1960 as The New Thing with the official blessing of the Art World, became a huge star, with his canvasses of Campbell's soup cans and Hollywood stars, and sculptures of Brillo Pad boxes, and all of the other things for which he's famous. And the program also shows interesting art by Warhol which is less well-known.

I came from a family which didn't understand modern painting and sculpture. I gradually came to appreciate it, but Pop Art like Andy's took me an especially long time. "Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture" might be helpful, extremely helpful, to someone who's puzzled by Warhol's art. It would also be helpful to watch the program with an open mind: there are interviews with dozens of people who loved and admired Andy, and they're all very intelligent, and they're not all lying to the viewer about thinking that Andy's art is brilliant.

I mention that they're not all lying about liking Warhol's art, because I know that there are still some people, in the year 2019, who believe that all of the most successful art since about 1860 has been one huge scam: the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, Picasso, Matisse, the Expressionists, the Abstract Expressionists, Pop Art, Postmodernism, whatever you call what came later -- all of it. I know that such people still exist because I'm related to some of them. I don't think that a wonderful 3-hour program like "Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture" would do them much good, because they wouldn't give it a chance. And what a shame that is.

TV Series About Art

Since I got rid of my TV last August, I've watched a lot of TV -- on YouTube.

In a recent post I reviewed Kenneth Clark's 1969 TV series "Civilisation." Since then I've seen about 15 minutes each of two series regarded as replies to Clark: John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" from 1972, and "Civilisations" from 2018, with multiple hosts. 15 minutes of the first episode of each of these series has been all that I've been able to stand so far. However, if I review them without watching them in their entirety, I'll be repeating exactly the same mistake which I finally rectified in the recent post about Clark's series. I can say truthfully, however, that the thought of watching either "Ways of Seeing" or "Civilisations" in its entirety fills me with sadness and dread.

15 minutes of the first episode is also about all that I could stomach of Robert Hughes' 1980 series about modern art, "The Shock of the New." I will not review it without watching it all. But I will say that if Robert Hughes ever said anything about art which was new even as long ago as 1980, it would come as a shock to me.

However, I have found one more show about art besides Clark which I enjoyed watching in its entirely and which I can therefore honestly recommend: "This is Modern Art," a six-part series hosted by Matthew Collings, first aired in 1999.



I'd never heard of Collings either, but I found his show quite informative and satisfying. I like the way that Collings can appreciate aspects of the work even of artists with whom he has major disagreements. Notably, Matisse.

Collings asks rhetorically what Matisse's art is about, and answers: beauty. His paintings are very beautiful. Collings then asks: what else are they about, and answers: nothing, and it turns out that this is a problem, not only for Collings but also for many modern artists and modern art critics.

I hadn't realized that this was a problem. But then, I've never been to art school. The fact that for modern artists general, beauty is not enough, that their art is expected to engage with society in some other way, is a great help in explaining some conversations I've had with artists which had puzzled me.

Back to Collings and Matisse: despite Matisse doing things wrong in what is, to modern artists generally, a very major way, Collings spends a lot of time in his series on Matisse, and finds very much to praise in his work. He finds depth in beauty alone. Although it's entirely clear that this is not really Collings' kind of art, an entire episode of the series, entitled "Lovely Lovely," is devoted to artists who only want to make their art pretty. The openness which Collings shows to these artists is quite impressive to me. Finding things to agree about with those with whom you fundamentally disagree: to me this is a sign of a very sharp mind.

Other artists to whom Collings devotes a lot of time, and who seem to be more up his general alley, include Dali, Warhol, Goya, Pollack, Judd and Koons. He manages to be quite witty and quite deep at the same time. Not very many of us can do that, it's sometimes harder than it looks.

Dream Log: Museum Visit With My Brother

Last night I dreamed I was in a museum, not any museum I knew from waking life. It was somewhere in the Detroit area, and it was mostly focused on late-20th- and 21st-century art. It was early evening, a little before twilight in summer, and the museum was crowded with people who'd been let in for an opening or some other special event. Like the identity of the museum, I was fuzzy on what sort of event it was exactly, but I was glad to have been let in. It was my first time there, and I was more interested in roaming the entire building, looking at as much of the entire collection as I could, than in focusing on whatever the opening or special event might happen to be.

Unlike the Guggenheim or a museum designed by Frank Gehry, this building seemed to be made deliberately in order not to compete for attention with the artworks it contained. The building felt new, but it was reminiscent of the Mies and the International Style: very rectangular, very subdued.

Just as I didn't know what museum it was or what the evening's special event was, so too I didn't recognize any individual artworks or know which artists had made them. There were a lot of paintings in monochrome and/or subdued colors, reminiscent of some of the less-colorful work of Marden, Martin, Soulanges and Motherwell. I liked these paintings very much. Then I came upon an artwork which completely covered all four walls of a very large room with a translucent grey-ish substance which looked like plastic which had melted, or like some sort of sugary candy in the process of being cooked -- but no, that's the wrong way to describe it, because it seemed neither warm nor sticky. On the contrary, the overall impression was quite inorganic and cool. Nor was there any smell of plastic. I had never experienced anything like it and I was quite impressed.

Not long after walking through that room, suddenly, my brother was walking along beside me. This was quite surprising, because in waking life, I have never known him to have any appreciation for, or curiosity about, modern art. He's always been a representative of the "my-5-year-old-daughter-paints-better-than-Picasso-did" school of art criticism, Picasso being one of perhaps only three artists, modern or not, whose names he knows, along with Leonardo and Michelangelo. In the dream, he didn't saying anything at all, appreciative or not, about all the non-representational and abstract art all around us. But the museum did contain some pre-modern art, and my brother said something positive about a painting which looked as if it was from the 17th century, showing a man with a grotesquely oversized chin a la Habsburg, astride a white horse.

My brother said he liked this painting, but pointed to the crude and unconvincing depiction of the horse's head, saying he thought this picture was probably made while the artist was still very young. A more mature painter, he said, would have painted the horse in a more realistic manner.

I tried to get my brother to look at the plaque on the wall beside the painting, giving its date and the dates of the birth and death of the painter. It had, in fact, been made when the artist was an old man. I tried to explain to my brother that artistic representations of animals generally had grown much more sophisticated since the 17th century, as mankind's knowledge of biology became more sophisticated. But I wasn't sure whether he was listening to me at all.

All That Dang Modern Art an Stuff

Last Night I saw a wonderful documentary on the Sundance Channel: Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World. I had seen some of Martin's paintings before, but had no particular reaction to them other than bewilderment, and I knew nothing of her biography. But I was fascinated, charmed... I'm searching for a stronger word... I was really captivated as Martin spoke. She talked about growing up in rural Saskatchewan and Vancouver, then living and painting in Taos and New York. Some of the things she said seemed a little weird to me, like that she had been married hundreds of times before, had hundreds of kids, in previous lives, and so had been fine with a more solitary life this time around. Some of it made a great deal of sense to me, like her advice not to worry about other people's mistakes, because your own will furnish you with plenty of material for learning. But everything she said was fascinating. And there was something very gentle and soothing about her voice and her manner. She talked about rejecting the prevailing way of life which relies on intellect and aggression, and instead emptying one's mind and awaiting inspiration.

My immediate family, when I was growing up, was not particularly receptive to modern art. By modern I mean Impressionism and everything after. Not that we were particularly attuned to painting and sculpture before Impressionism. We were more up on music, all genres, classical, folk, pop, jazz, there we were a little more caught up. There was usually at least one keyboard instrument in the house at any given time. At times there were lots of different instruments in the house.

But not very many paintings or prints, and very little that by any stretch of the imagination could be called sculpture. So what little I know about that sort of thing I've picked up elsewhere. When I was 19 years old I had a roommate for a short period of time who was a pretty accomplished draftsman and painter. He explained to me, drawing with various colored markers as he spoke, how abstraction can come out of representation. When I was in my 20's, I was tearing illustrations out of some magazines and taping them up on my wall for decoration, and I saw a picture of a painting by Matisse, and I looked at it and wondered what the fuss was about. I taped it onto the wall alongside pictures of models and movie stars and cars and such, to see whether it would grow on me. It did, and that in turn opened my mind to other artists. I had already become interested in the Impressionists, and in the superstar artists of the '80's, Sherman and Longo and Salle and Schnabel. Especially Schnabel. Some people snicker at Schnabel. I don't care. I suspect he doesn't either. He's grandiose, which means he's aiming for great things and willing to miss badly now and then for the sake of the chance of great success. Well, Hell, I don't know what Schnabel is aiming for and shouldn't speak for him. All I wanted to say was: let 'em snicker, who cares.

Some art I like right away, like that of Schnabel and Pollock, some artists have taken me awhile, like Matisse and Van Gogh, some I'm still working on, like Martin and Donald Judd, with whom Martin was exhibited decades ago -- mistakenly, she said in the documentary on Sundance, because she was not a minimalist. Minimalists, she said, did not display their emotions in their art, she did.

I suppose my writing is not minimalist. Other than that I approach things much differently than did Agnes Martin, who died in 2004 at the age of 92. I am ego-driven, I am concerned with facts. Or with the attempt to closely approximate facts.

And I suppose I haven't put as much distance between myself and my family on the subject of art as I sometimes like to think. As much as I deride the wholesale way they dismiss modern genres, as enthusiastically as I like so many painters and sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries, I haven't completely extinguished within myself the suspicion we all felt in my childhood home when we saw art we didn't understand, the fear that someone was just pulling our leg. (Sometimes, of course, modern artists are pulling the public's collective leg, but not as often, and not at all as crudely as we thought, as some of them still think.)

I want to understand everything, although I understand that I never will, that I shouldn't even want to, that it's absurd, a mania. There's a ravenousness to my curiosity sometimes. I wonder where I got that. I don't see it in any of my blood relatives. They're better off not sharing that with me, there is no doubt.

But I try to urge them to keep an open mind when it comes to all that dang weird modern art. I seem to have no talent for making interesting pictures and objects, so I talk them up instead.

There was a stand-up comedian who had a half-hour special on Comedy Central recently, who was that guy? I'm sorry I don't remember his name. I didn't recognize him, I only caught the last few minutes of his special, but I loved what I saw. And I especially loved the way he ended his set: his last words were, "Less killing! More art! Less killing! More art!" He said it twice, like that.

I like it so much, I'll say it again: Less killing! More art!