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Up close and impersonal
The ‘private’ life of Andy Warhol at the Fitchburg Museum
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Andy Warhol: Intimate and Unseen Photographs from the Jon J. Gould Collection"
At the Fitchburg Art Museum, 185 Elm Street, Fitchburg, through June 5.


Some time after Andy Warhol’s death in 1987, I remember reading an interview with Lou Reed in which he said something to the effect that Warhol always made those around him feel lazy because he never stopped working. The observation stuck, I suppose, because it was so unexpected. Nothing about the public Warhol ever suggested Type A, not the static, deadpan expression, not the laconic manner or the dweeby attire, and especially not the bleached, flattened hair or the skin bordering on albino.

Nearly 20 years later, Reed’s observation, with its elements of both admiration and rebuke, offers a key to understanding if not the art at least the artist. Warhol’s surface was all camouflage. The man who seemed the poster child for jet-set ennui was understood by those close to him to be an indefatigable accomplishment junkie. What looked to the public like fathomless disregard was the opposite, calculated intensity.

"Intimate and Unseen," a small, strange gem of an exhibit at the Fitchburg Art Museum, allows for both Warhols, the public mannequin and the private man. Constructed mostly of his black-and-white photographs but including also a half-dozen seldom-seen screenprints, it allows for several other Warhols as well — the engaged artist, the dispassionate observer, the lover.

The most compelling Warhol is the artist who remade iconic American images into colorful, dramatically stylized screenprints. High on the list of his most compelling re-creations is his 1983 Ingrid Bergman with Hat. My guess is that the original photo on which the print is based came from a Casablanca movie still. Bergman is wearing a 1940s-style broad-brimmed hat; her stare is determined without being steely, rooted in courage, and she’s at the fullest bloom of her angular beauty. Warhol messes with what can’t be messed with — Mao, Jackie O., the Wicked Witch of the West. His Bergman has been camped and glammed and frilled and neoned with the usual overlay of Sgt. Pepper colors and cartoony embellishments to eyebrows and lips. But all the gussying is pure overlay. Under the movie still, under the transparently artificial affectations of color and design, beyond all the overwrought self-consciousness and posing, those same eyes and that same resolve suggest a human presence that has pushed the movie industry and the attention-famished artist aside. There’s Ingrid Bergman, visible still despite time and profit and art. In emphasizing "style," Warhol makes Bergman’s presence all the more real.

Joseph Beuys in a brimmed hat appears four times in a two-by-two-inch grid; the outline of his features remains identical while the colors of each quadrant vary. The effect is musical — same instrument, different tones. Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, on the other hand, becomes unsettling. The image itself is now commonplace, with the astronaut, his face hidden by the reflection cast off the glass windshield of his helmet, balancing robot-like on the deserty lunar surface. Nearby, an American flag hangs from a pole; it looks like something you might see on a suburban lawn. The image is recast with vibrant crayon colors; the result looks like a page from a big coloring book, a human milestone reconfigured as a child’s activity. For many of us who were alive at that moment and saw the broadcast from which Warhol’s picture derives, the context of that event — the war in Vietnam — made the achievement bittersweet. No reference to the larger culture is evident in any one aspect of Warhol’s print; it’s evident throughout. The scene isn’t grandiose, it’s silly; the astronaut isn’t a hero, he’s more like Gumby; and the conquering of space has been made postage-stamp pretty, a scientific achievement on the order of air sneakers or satellite TV.

"Intimate and Unseen" displays the screenprints as a coda to the unusually tender photos Warhol took of his boyfriend Jon Gould, and though those pictures dominate the show, the real show stopper is the one occasion where photos and screenprints intersect. A makeshift wall bears a red-drenched, larger-than-life print of the face of Jane Fonda; gradually you realize that the color and the design surrounding her unmistakable intelligent visage is actually her hair. And then you notice a diminutive black-and-white photo on a nearby wall — the picture Warhol took of Fonda that became the basis for his print. What’s amazing — and this may be Warhol’s ultimate genius — is how little he interfered, how extraordinarily hard he worked not to interpret her gaze or her features, how the print in its bright, stylized way (style being Warhol’s true signature — he signed his name to almost nothing) is an effort to see Fonda as she sat for him, looking over her shoulder, handsome and mannish, delicate and square-jawed in her Marie Antoinette ’do, purposeful and impish, a renegade soul. This isn’t just Warhol at his best, it’s Warhol as he can best be presented.

But the real focus of this rich and idiosyncratic show is Warhol’s love affair with Jon Gould, a man more than 20 years his junior, a motion-picture executive who died of AIDS in 1986, at age 33. Warhol took most (but not all) of the pictures in the show, and many of the best shots center on his lover. What’s interesting about the photographs (besides their ability to indicate Warhol’s compositional sense and his unsettling ability to be up close and impersonal) is that Gould can’t be pigeonholed. He’s almost a different person in each shot, refusing to be typified, almost refusing to be recognizable. In some, he’s the buff hunk on the beach; in others, he’s the wall-eyed guy with a glass of wine at a downtown party, awkward in his skin and awkwardly shaped. Other times, he’s quietly playful and self-contained, making a snow angel, asleep on a plane.

What’s special about these pictures isn’t their subject, who comes across as good-natured, gentle, and without the least trace of ferocity, intellectual or otherwise. What’s special is that Warhol took them. We learn from the wall text that in the last years of his life Warhol was an inveterate picture taker; a cache of more 100,000 pictures found after his death reveals that he was taking somewhere between 6000 and 9000 photos each year. What’s sad about this body of work is how guarded it appears beside his screenprints, corny almost. The Oak Bluffs carousel on Martha’s Vineyard, Jon Gould folded like an accordion on a beach chair at his parents’ summer house, a view from a ferry looking out over the widening ocean to the mainland — there’s no urgency to these pictures. They’re more about safekeeping. The edgier stuff, the exploratory, charged, ironic, expansive work of the screenprints, is the art for which Warhol continues to earn his notoriety.


Issue Date: April 29 - May 5, 2005
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