If you head to the Met’s exhibit Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years searching for the ways Warhol provoked and liberated other artists, you’ll find it. But the show might be most compelling as a summation of Warhol’s own work. It includes pieces from all phases of his career, and it’s far more compact and energetic than a blockbuster. There are, in a string of small second-floor galleries beside the museum’s European master paintings, some of the artist’s Greatest Hits: a soup can, Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, two Marilyns, an Elvis, portraits, and cow wallpaper. Each one displays Warhol’s graphic virtuosity, and seems to be orchestrated for maximum optical impact. There’s a small, square Marilyn, the size of an album cover, whose colors and shades are rendered with such pristine concentration that it’s like a piece of jewelry.

There are also, by Warhol, two Jackies, a car crash, and two electric chairs. These works have the same formal power as the happier ones. In fact Orange Disaster #5, a 3x5 grid of electric chairs against a burn-colored field, might be the finest piece in the show. Its scale (it’s the size of a double door), severe composition, and lush gradations stop you as you walk by. It’s majestic. These pieces tap a rich, darker strain, one the artist abandoned later to take on more deliberately superficial subjects like flowers and celebrity portraits. (When I asked a friend what might have caused this shift she deadpanned, “Drugs.”) The exhibit highlights these darker pieces by juxtaposing them with the work of contemporary artists who engaged political subjects. But Warhol’s fascination with death and violence seems entirely personal. These canvases are like emotional maps, looking into the head and the heart. While they’re brilliantly composed they’re gruesome and could not have been uncomplicated to execute. Did Warhol numb himself in order to silkscreen this image of a man dying in an ambulance accident, twice? I doubt he was interested in the irony of the circumstances, but in the man’s spectacular physical vulnerability. The artist completed most of these darker works in the early 1960’s, before the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. What would have happened if he’d kept on with it? Would we think of him today the way we think of Goya?

November 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses

There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture. Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism. She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list. Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home. The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building. He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe." Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose.

Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… " Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory. It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him. Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach. The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel.

March 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses