Have We Smothered Warhol With Our Admiration?

“I am not convinced this is painting myself. But it exists. Here it is.” In the summer of 1962, that was as much zeal as the curator Sam Wagstaff dared show when he hung a huge Soup Can by Andy Warhol, giving the Pop artist his first museum play.

In 1964, after Warhol’s American backers spurned his landmark Death and Disaster paintings, he was forced to premiere them in Paris — where he received a fearsome pan in Le Monde newspaper: “It’s all very well for Warhol to take a single dramatic shot of a suicide or crash victim and silk-screen it all over a canvas, but that accumulation doesn’t add or take away from what is fundamentally unique about any typical traffic accident — from what makes it anti-Pop.”

Later that year, a couple of committed bohemians were so disgusted by the retreads Warhol was being paid to do of his first Marilyns that they put a bullet through a stack of those new commissions.

And now those once-suspect works — that very Soup Can; a great Car Crash; a bullet-pierced Marilyn — are on view in “Andy Warhol: Thirty Are Better than One,” a survey of five decades of purchases by Peter Brant in that collector’s New York foundation in the East Village. They have never looked more impressive than afloat in the light and air and postindustrial glam of its repurposed substation.

Some 50 classic works of Pop are joined by a few of their 1950s antecedents and then by two dozen more post-Pop pictures: A Shadow, from 1978; a vast Oxidation that Warhol “painted” with urine around that same time; wall-filling examples of his Camouflage and Last Supper series, made just months before the artist’s death in 1987. It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to the glories of Warhol.

But maybe we’d be better off imagining a worse one — an introduction that helps us acknowledge not the rightness of Warhol’s achievement, as it comes off today, but the profound and fertile wrongness that was in it from the start. In the plush setting of the Brant, it takes an effort to shake off the comfort his pictures now come with and rediscover the discomfort they once served up.

If it’s standard to laugh at critics who failed to recognize the virtues of a great avant-gardist, in Warhol’s case we should praise them for the “good trouble” their pans pointed out. Wagstaff, the curator, was maybe registering something important when he worried that Warhol’s painted soup cans might deliver a deathblow to established notions of painting. When the critic in Le Monde noted that the accumulated imagery of a car-crash painting refused to either “add or take away” from its potent subject, he was quite right — that’s what standard art did, but Warhol broke new ground by presenting his vexed subjects with the coldest deadpan. When Warhol took money to repeat his early icons they did indeed become “dead paintings,” as he once called them, and those gun-toting bohemians only went wrong in seeing this as a cause for rage, not cogitation.

The Marilyn retreads they attacked should help us understand that more than almost any other artist, Warhol was willing to recognize how stuff that starts life looking like art can end it acting like currency. He already underlined that the first time he got to hang a Pop work in a commercial show, in the spring of 1962, when he displayed a big canvas onto which he’d printed images of 200 one-dollar bills, which he then priced at $200 . (It’s probably Warhol’s first silk-screened painting; one of the treasures at the Brant is that work’s near-identical twin, showing 196 bills. There’s no record of whether it ever listed at $196.)

Where that first price tag got at Warhol’s caustic essence, taking a jab at the way art and money might be the same thing, the prices his paintings fetch today define his works as the safest of deluxe commodities. Brant’s big Soup Can cost him almost $30 million in 2017. Last November, he spent $85 million on his Car Crash. That spring, a twin of his Marilyn, but not quite as good, had sold at auction for $195 million; only Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” has topped it at auction. (Brant’s Marilyn is better than the one sold in 2022 because you can see its bullet hole. Warhol once told Brant not to retouch it out.)

“Who the heck is going to want to look at an eight-foot picture of a hideous car crash, Andy?” a friend once asked Warhol, using a stronger expletive. “You’re going to kill your economy.” To which the artist replied, “Oh well, it has to be done.” He couldn’t imagine that his market would grow to consume even crashes and suicides. It’s almost as though our current culture of wealth has set out to neutralize Warhol’s threat by diluting it in a flood of dollars.

Or maybe “threat” isn’t quite the right word, since it implies a single, willed message that Warhol wanted to send. Instead, indecision and ambiguity are the true hallmarks of his art. They can do as much to vex an art lover as more obvious menace can.

At the Brant, a canvas more than 13 feet tall comes covered in a vast Rorschach pattern, hand-blotted by Warhol in 1984. It’s the apotheosis of a shape designed to be read differently by each viewer.

Another canvas from 1986, and a full 35 feet long, is silk-screened edge to edge to look like classic camouflage. That means a design meant to render something unseeable has been used to create an art object whose very essence is to be seen.

In these, like in almost all his best work, Warhol was getting to the heart of that weird thing called fine art, as it has played out over the last five centuries of Western culture: Its fundamental function is not to have a function — to be up for grabs, Rorschach-like, as each new audience comes to grips with any object presented as art. Philosophically, Western fine art can be defined as something that insists on being seen while perpetually camouflaging what it might be about.

Soup can or painting? Grisly accident or appealing pattern? Masterpiece or salable product?

“Yes,” Warhol answers. That, his works at the Brant say, is the answer that makes something art.

Any Warhol: Thirty Are Better Than OneThrough July 30 at The Brant Foundation, 421 East Sixth Street, Manhattan; 212-777-2297; brantfoundation.org for advance purchase of timed tickets.