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Warhol began doing shoe illustratations in the '50s and enjoyed a brief period, between 1962 and 1966, when his soup cans and other baleful icons of American glut and repetition could be taken quite seriously as art. Since then his work has regressed to its origins in advertising, while his career has moved just as steadily forward in an aura of publicity and social toadying. Portraiture has been the mainstay of his career for the past ten years, for he was astute enough to realize that no other star "names" of current art were doing it and that the clientele he homed on were not going to get tired of the sight of their own faces.
The procedure was simple. Since the social portrait was largely killed by photography, Warhol used photos: all problems of depiction were thus telescoped into a simple act of choosing an image, rather than making it. The snapshot of the subject was silk-screened and the enlarged image printed on canvas over a mix of decorator colors. The image thus acts as a rubber stamp and seldom bears any discernible relationship to the pistachio-and-strawberry glop on which it sits. This casualness is part of the point since, although true irony is the enemy of narcissism, Warhol's indifference is very much its friend. Now and then he adds a little handwork, in the form of some wobbly drawing along the edge of an arm or a cheek. Perhaps it is meant to reassure his clients that despite his well-known claim in the '60s that he wanted to be come a machine, he has not yet done so.
This facetious décor can look pleasant, one canvas at a time, in the salons for which it is destined. Multiplied to 150 or so examples and thrust into a neutral museum space, it looks coarse and repetitious. It can hardly be said to exist with in the sphere of aesthetic debate. And although the catalogue essay compares this autistic cake icing to the work of Ma net and the Byzantine mosaicists, as well as that of his former self, Warhol has clearly become something less interesting than any of these. He is the LeRoy Neiman of the Olympic Tower.
The Whitney Museum has something to gain from the promotional effort it is making with this show: it needs money, and Warhol is so well known that any exhibition of his work can be relied on to bring crowds. But though Whitney Direc tor Tom Armstrong announces in the catalogue that "I have never wavered from the mark with Monsieur Warhola . . .
when the last lifeboat is launched I want old Blondie at the oars," there are others who may not want to join him in the shallows on this particular raft of the Me dusa, crowded as it is with the glittery, the raucous, the beady-eyed and the badly painted.
—Robert Hughes