Pop Idol

It was Andy Warhol – artist, director, 20th-century pop-culture icon – who said “they always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Although looking at his latest exhibition at Tate Modern this month, the first at the museum for more than two decades, its profound message is paradoxically how both everything and nothing has changed.

Surfing the wave of cultural transformation – if not propelling it from the ground up – Warhol’s work today is as significant and mesmerising as it was in his heyday. Homosexual, introvert, and from a deeply religious, low-income migrant background (his parents were both Czech), he was an unlikely poster-boy for the American art scene. His work radically rejected the prevalent abstract expressionist style of the 1950s, and pushed the boundaries through his use of medium, technology and subject.

Showcasing more than 100 pieces spanning his prolific career, the show demonstrates how Warhol’s personal experiences influenced his perception of the fluctuating creative, social, political and technological landscape around him. His truly symbolic and much imitated paintings of Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe reflected the explosion of American branding and celebrity and its infiltration of popular culture, but also people’sperception of what art itself could be.

Through celebrating everyday subjects and objects in his work (“What's great about this country is that America

started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest”), his influences, fascinations and flirtations with commercialism were often literal, but certainly not conventional. This exhibition looks deeper than the immediately identifiable, touching on themes such as desire, identity and religion, which emerge from his biography.

Born Andrew Warhola, he grew up in Pittsburgh to deeply religious parents who were devout followers of the Byzantine Catholic Church (also known as the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church). The strong religious views of his mother are presented as providing the context for a lot of his work, along with his sexuality (and unsurprisingly the conflict between the two). In his gold circular painting Marilyn (1962), Warhol utilised Byzantine Catholic iconography to transform the movie star and gay icon into a modern-day saint.

A whole room will also be devoted to one of his most fascinating series, Ladies and Gentlemen, which was first exhibited in Ferrara, Italy, in 1975. Here Warhol produced more than 250 brightly coloured portraits of New York’s African-American and Latino drag queens and trans-women. Partly lent from a private collector, it presents the largest ever staging of the series in the UK.

Warhol’s final works of the 1980s, such as the poignant Sixty Last Suppers (1986) – on view for the first time in this country – will be considered in relation to the artist’s untimely death as well as the unfolding HIV/AIDS epidemic, which ultimately went on to impact the lives of many in his close circle. Originally commissioned by Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino, the paintings were created at a time of growing public interest in gender fluidity and followed the passing of Warhol superstar, the American actress and trans icon Candy Darling. While thankfully, in the US and UK at least, attitudes towards the treatment and stigma of HIV have shifted (to a degree), current conversations about gender renders the series exceptionally timely. Unfortunately, religious fervor has changed little in the years that have passed. As Warhol once asked: “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”

Although at the time the Ladies and Gentleman sitters were not named, they included some prominent community figures such as Marsha ‘Pay it no mind’ Johnson, who played a key role in the Stonewall uprising of 1969. New research by the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2018 finally identified all but one of the 14 sitters, enabling Tate Modern to name the seven who will feature in the exhibition alongside their portraits for the first time. Some of Warhol’s other early line drawings of male portraits and nudes from the 1950s are paired with the film Sleep (1963), which documents Warhol’s lover, the poet John Giorno. This examines how the artist pushed the boundaries on how we classify artists, and how popular culture defines art in general. Nearly 70 years on, the question is still being tested.

Of course, his iconic works from the pop-art period, such as Marilyn Diptych (1962), Elvis I and II (1963/1964) and Race Riot (1964), will all be observed through today’s kaleidoscopic political and cultural lens. Warhol’s unique ambition and innovation when it came to pushing the traditional boundaries of media will be represented via his famous Screen Tests (1964–6) and a recreation of the psychedelic multimedia environment of Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966), originally produced for the Velvet Underground rock shows. Visitors will also be able to experience Warhol’s floating Silver Clouds (1966) installation, initially meant to signal his retirement from painting in favour of moviemaking. He famously stated that “good business is the best art”: the exhibition will also examine why Warhol took such an interest in publishing and TV, as well as his role in the much documented club culture of the era.

The showcase will celebrate the UK debut of Warhol’s vast 10-metre wide canvas Sixty Last Suppers, which depicts six rows of 10 silkscreened images, each a black-and-white reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic mural The Last Supper. Created in 1986, just a few months before the artist died in his sleep while recovering from gall bladder surgery, it is poignant in its evocative themes of faith, immortality and the afterlife, topics that are no doubt reflective of his religious upbringing, as well as his close brush with death in the late sixties when he was shot and briefly pronounced dead in hospital. When looking closely at Warhol’s compendium of creations, mortality stands out as a surprisingly central idea to some of his most renowned works, including his depictions of skulls and news images of disasters.

While the artist prophesised – in a time before reality TV – that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, Warhol was no novelty act. But not even this visionary could predict how symbolic and central his reflections on contemporary popular culture would still be for generations to come.