ANDY WARHOL: THE LAST DECADE BY JOSEPH D KETNER II


defensive earthworks that are still visible
in many parts of England. His relation-
ship with the English countryside took
on a mystical quality, as in Landscape
from a Dream (1936–8), with several charac-
teristic objects in it: a mirror, a structure
of slats which could be a screen except
that it has no panels, a large bird, the sea
and the coastal cliffs of Dorset, the sun as
a large red ball.

One very helpful aspect of this book
is the practice of printing comments
by Nash himself and his wife, Margaret,
together with those of an array of friends,
critics, exhibition curators, biographers,
or art historians with each of the pictures
illustrated. These enigmatic images and
combinations are like Rorschach tests for
art historians, and the comments through
the decades are sometimes rather spec-
ulative but nevertheless thought provok-
ing. Even when they contradict each other
they suggest interesting lines of approach.
Nash’s own descriptions of his work show
how his ideas developed, often from quite
mundane country walks or from a sudden
perception.

Several commentators mention a simi-
larity to de Chirico in Nash’s mysterious
structures and shadows of off-stage
figures. There are also faint echoes of
René Magritte. Nash was at heart the
kind of Surrealist who sees similarities
in objects which others see as merely a

rock and a leaf or a tree stump and a cloud.
One of his most surreal pictures, Harbour
and Room (1931), shows the walls of
a room which also seems to contain a
harbour, so that a boat seems to be sailing
into the room instead of merely being
visible from the window.

Officially there are 99 figures in the
book, separately numbered in the essays
and the catalogue proper, but there
are more than that because sometimes
one number relates to both a picture
and an enlarged detail of it. The numbers
given in the heading of this article reflect
the true number of illustrations, by my
count, at least. Suffice it to say that the
book is a beautifully illustrated and
intelligently organised way in to Nash
and his work.

sarah lawson

Writer and translator

ANDY WARHOL: THE LAST DECADE

joseph d ketner ii

DelMonico Books: Prestel Publishing 2009 d45.00
$60.00
224 pp. 144 col/7 mono illus
isbn 978-3-7913-4344-0

M
uch has recently been written in
consideration of a supposed ‘late
style’ in the careers of certain

artists. This catalogue, which accompa-
nies an exhibition travelling to major US
museums in Milwaukee, Fort Worth,
Brooklyn, and Baltimore between Septem-
ber 2009 and January 2011, is not in that

camp. Instead, Warhol is presented here as
having had his most prolific and diverse
decade of artistic production by reinvent-
ing and returning to earlier themes and
modes of work, including hand-painted
figural work, at the end of his life.
The catalogue’s 80 plates thus focus on
the following series: the 1978 silkscreen
Self-Portraits; the 1978 Oxidation Paintings
(urine on metallic pigment); the 1978–80
Shadow Paintings; the 1979 Big Retrospective
Painting; the 1983 Yarn Paintings; the 1984
Rorschach Paintings; the 1984–6 paintings
in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Francesco Clemente; and finally,
the 1986 Self-Portraits, Camouflage and Last
Supper paintings. By any measure this
is a prodigious output, especially consid-
ering that nearly all of it is in very large
format.

The catalogue’s argument in regard to
the proper orientation from which to
consider Warhol’s late paintings is mar-
shalled by three eclectic essays. The first,
by the curator of the exhibition, Joseph
Ketner, explains the pivotal role of the late
1970s Oxidation Paintings in turning Warhol
away from silkscreened Pop images.
Ketner deftly shows that this turn away
was also a kind of return insofar as the
Oxidation series is also the product of
Warhol’s recollection of having urinated
on a few blank canvases in the early 1960s.
But so too, insofar as these paintings
might be seen as a gay parody of Jackson
Pollock, do they demonstrate Warhol’s
continuing fixation with and admiration
for abstract art. For Warhol – who arrived
in New York as a 20-year old in 1949 –
painting meant, for better or worse,
abstraction. Two key exhibitions of 1979
are claimed to have the most profound
influence on the direction and content of
Warhol’s late paintings. One is the Heiner
Friedrich Gallery show in Soho, New
York of Warhol’s Shadow Paintings, 102
large, abstract, silkscreened and painted
canvases which the artist conceived
to be hung in a continuous sequence,
abutting one another around the walls
of the entire gallery. This installation
thus harked back to the installation of
Warhol’s Elvis paintings in 1963 at the
Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The Shadow
Paintings exhibition, despite Warhol’s
anxieties concerning its reception, was a
critical success. A very contrary response,
however, awaited Warhol’s late 1979
exhibition at the Whitney Museum:
‘Portraits of the Seventies’. This show

Paul Nash,Landscape atIden (1929) Tate,London
r Tate,London, 2009.FromPaulNash: The
Elements by David FraserJenkins (ed.).

20 The Art Book volume 17 issue 3 august 2010 r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah

Exhibitions,Museums andGalleries



instead became iconic for critics, who
took it to be symptomatic of all that
was supposedly wrong with the art and
celebrity culture of the 1970s. Warhol,
always a master strategist, did not fail
to learn the artworld lesson of having
committed a large portion of his 1970s
output to celebrity portraiture. 1980
would thus include more Shadow Paintings,
followed soon thereafter by the abstrac-
tions of the Yarn and Rorschach Paintings.
The next step forward, for which
Warhol himself credited the collabora-
tions with Basquiat, was the return to
making paintings by brush. The ambiguity
and tentativeness of Ketner’s conclusion
nicely mimics these same major themes
within Warhol’s work: ‘It is almost as if
Warhol had anticipated the artistic avant-
garde of the late 1970s and 1980s by
introducing a revival of painting, appro-
priation, and figuration’.

The second essay, ‘Andy Warhol: Ab-
straction’, by Keith Hartley, is concerned
primarily with locating the proper place
of the late paintings among the works
of a few of the great abstractionists
of the twentieth century. Hartley makes
a compelling case for the influence of
Paul Klee, Pollock, and Ellsworth Kelly
on what come to be the Yarn, Rorschach,
and Camouflage paintings. So too is the
influence of Duchamp and Dada invoked,
along with that of Picasso’s own late
figure paintings, the better to illuminate
Warhol’s ambitions for the look of
the Oxidation and later Mao paintings.
One of the many connections to the
influence of Pollock had already been

noted by H D Buchloh and Rosalind
Krauss in their observation that Warhol’s
Diagram paintings of 1962 were placed
on the floor at the time of their first
exhibition. Hartley’s most insightful
commentary explains the format of the
Shadow Paintings as the product of War-
hol’s longstanding appreciation for Klee’s
technique of achieving nonfigurative ab-
straction via the repetitions of formal
elements. So too does Hartley nicely
capture the mood of several of the late
figurative paintings, including Last Supper
and portrait paintings, in which the
images are covered with camouflage, by
describing them as perfectly reflective of
Warhol’s ambivalence toward his own
fixation with abstraction.

This Warholian ambivalence is
carried over into the title of the third
substantive essay, by Gregory Volk: ‘The
late, great Andy Warhol’. Volk’s informed
impulse is to see Warhol as an echt
American, and therewith to place him
in the same stream as three other robustly
American figures, though of the nine-
teenth century: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Walt Whitman and, most poignantly,
P T Barnum. Volk thus succeeds in
revealing new aspects of Warhol’s work
by declaring the continuity of his artistic
achievement with the lives and works of
some very particular, and particularly
American, self-made pioneering spirits.
In sum, this is a thoughtful, provocative,
and well-illustrated catalogue of Warhol’s
late work.

tom huhn

School of Visual Arts, New York City

THE DARKER SIDE OF LIGHT:

ARTS OF PRIVACY, 1850–1900

peter parshall (ed.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington/Lund
Humphries 2009 d35.00 $50.00
192 pp. 86 col illus
isbn 978-1-84822-021-8

T
he curators of Washington’s National
Gallery of Art took a refreshing deci-
sion to draw our attention, with this

thematic selection of artists’ prints and
small-scale sculpture from the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, to a period
which saw a rich flowering of graphic art. The
exhibition travelled to the Hammer Muse-
um, Los Angeles and the Smart Museum,
Chicago. It has also led to the production of a
fine book to accompany the show.

With the honourable exceptions of
Mary Cassatt and Käthe Kollwitz, the story
is very much one of troubled artists and
troubling, if not to say fatal, women.
Shadows and silhouettes, glimpsed in
enclosed rooms, shafts of light finding a
way through draped windows, illuminat-
ing their subjects, find their ideal medium
in the richly textured tones of soft-ground
etching, aquatint and lithotint, occasion-
ally abstracted to the extremes of read-
ability, in the case of Degas’ monotypes.
The strengths of the medium also emerge
in the oppressive interiors of labour and
poverty in the work of Kollwitz. But they

Andy Warhol,Self-Portrait (Strangulation),1978.
Collection of Anthony d’O¡ay.From AndyWarhol:
TheLastDecade byJoseph DKetner II.

r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah volume 17 issue 3 august 2010 The Art Book 21

Exhibitions,Museums and Galleries