Warhol's Final Years

A new exhibition celebrates the Pop artist’s last decade, including never-before-seen works and collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

Andy Warhol is undeniably America’s most celebrated artist, but he is also one of its most misunderstood. Nearly everyone knows Warhol for his Pop Art paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe, while others acknowledge him for launching the rock band The Velvet Underground; making avant-garde films, such as Lonesome Cowboys and Trash; and founding Interview magazine. However, few people have seen Warhol’s prolific production of paintings from the final phase of his life. Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, which is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum through January 3, presents some 50 paintings made in the final years before the artist’s death in 1987, while giving us the chance to re-evaluate these works within his complete oeuvre.

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Rarely seen Warhol self-portraits from 1978 offer a good introduction to the survey. Self‐Portrait Wallpaper decorates the walls of the entranceway to the show with a repeated, youthful depiction of the artist, while Self‐Portrait (Strangulation), a colorful 10-part painting, captures the writer Glenn O’Brien’s hands around Warhol’s neck, pretending to choke him. Next up are two reversal paintings, where the blacks are rendered in white, of Marilyn and Mona Lisa, are minimal in palette and lead nicely into a group of more abstract works.

The Oxidation Paintings, which reveal marks made by urinating on canvas painted with a metallic paint, and the Shadow paintings, which portray a ghostly shadow supposedly made from lighting children’s blocks, along with a group of later Rorschach paintings, are the most abstract works on view. The show makes the argument for a pair of large Egg paintings and several paintings of yarn to be considered abstractions; but the eggs are still representational, even on a grand scale, and the yarn works are just plain kitsch pieces, which were originally made as a commission for a yarn manufacturer.

Warhol has the biggest challenge of the decade when he starts collaborating on paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente—two art stars of the 1980s. The idea for the collaboration seems to have been bridged by Zurich art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who ended up with all of the works. With few exceptions, including Alba’s Breakfast, which is part of this show, the three artists working together was a disaster. Everyone painted over one another. It was only when Warhol and Basquiat collaborated on their own that the concept really clicked.

The best thing that came out of the collaborations for Warhol was that he had started painting by hand again. Basquiat’s obliteration of his silkscreen marks forced Warhol to respond with a brush. After The New York Times panned the Basquiat/Warhol show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985, the two artists went their own ways, but Warhol had been rejuvenated. With the aid of a new, expansive studio, he started painting big. Double $5/Weightlifter from 1985-86 is a massive black-and-white acrylic on linen painting that combines a muscleman with a store-sticker price.