Power surge
Currier's Warhol show has a political edge
Five years after President John F. Kennedy was shot, Andy Warhol responded with a portfolio of 14 color screenprints made from images he found in newspapers and on TV.
"It seemed like no matter how hard you tried," he said of media coverage in the days between Kennedy's assassination and burial, "you couldn't get away from the thing."
The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., recently purchased these screenprints, known as the "Flash - November 22, 1963" portfolio, and the acquisition provided the spur for a major show this fall focusing on Warhol's politically related work.
"Warhol: Pop Politics," timed to coincide with the 2008 election season, tracks Warhol's fascination with the Kennedys - not just John and Jackie but Bobby and Teddy, too - plus an array of presidents and presidential candidates, foreign queens and communist dictators.
Nominally, at least in the '70s, Warhol was a Democrat (he once said that Gerald Ford's son, Jack, was the only Republican he knew). But he was not really one for political convictions. He was more interested in power, its relationship to publicity, and the point at which both turned to dull, anaesthetizing banality.
"He knew packaging and could teach it to others," wrote critic Robert Hughes, and indeed, Warhol's images portraying human butchers like Mao as benign, gorgeously colored celebrities can still chill. (They remind us, too, of Warhol's all-pervasive influence on contemporary Chinese art, which jubilantly embraces no end of contradiction.)
"Warhol was intentionally evasive about his political views," says Sharon Matt Atkins, an assistant curator at the Currier who has put together the show. "He was always afraid of offending someone."
Matt Atkins spent a week trawling through some of Warhol's so-called "Time Capsules" - collections of press clippings, posters, and every other kind of ephemera that Warhol deposited in 610 cardboard boxes between the early '60s and the late '80s. In the process, she unearthed fascinating material relating to some of Warhol's best-known images, including preparatory studies. Some of this archival material is in the show, including excerpts from a 1965 reenactment of the Kennedy assassination filmed at Warhol's Factory.
His most overtly political work was a silkscreen of Richard Nixon in sickly green, his mouth fixed in a reptilian leer, with the words "Vote McGovern" beneath. Funds raised by sales of the image went directly to George McGovern's campaign.
But later, as his toadying to celebrity, his disinterest in actual character, and his fascination with fame in and of itself became more blatant, Warhol's politics became more conservative - or, perhaps more accurately, less engaged. It's no surprise, given Ronald Reagan's preexisting status as a Hollywood celebrity, that Warhol courted him when he came to power. He used his magazine, Interview, as an instrument of relentless flattery in his attempts to be made official court portraitist to the Reagan administration, but no commission eventuated.
If Warhol's politically related imagery still has the power to fascinate, it's not because of any ideology or conviction behind the work. It's because its mechanical, affectless, but immensely seductive nature mirrored developments in political presentation that we are all heirs to today. He saw politicians as human brand images - which is exactly how many politicians have come to see themselves.
Sept. 27-Jan. 4. 603-669-6144, www .currier.org.
Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com. 