Without a Doubt

John Haber
in New York City

Revelation: Andy Warhol and the Church

Alex Katz

"We're more popular than Jesus now." John Lennon had no qualms about it either, in a 1966 interview, but was he right? Andy Warhol might have disagreed.

Three years earlier, Warhol drew on a photo of the throng in Saint Peter's Square, in Vatican City, for a work of art. Blown up to poster size, as Crowd, it makes Beatlemania look modest by comparison. Enlarged still further, to wallpaper, it opens a show of his faith, as "Revelation" at the Brooklyn Museum. You may have your doubts, about Christianity or the entire exhibition, but it outlines a private side to Warhol that you might never have known. It also beings out a serious side to his art that skeptics too often overlook. The photo itself has a dense pattern of lights and darks, but within the exhibition the darkness wins out.

Alex Katz need not stop you in your tracks with Blue Umbrella, a portrait of his wife. The passing moment is more than enough. Art has all it can do to stand out in a world awash in images, and he should know. That is what makes his best work Pop Art, without a soup can in sight. Art has an even harder time in the Guggenheim rotunda, assuming it ever enters. Katz has a way, though, of making you look back.

That portrait approaches a billboard not just in its size, but in its style. It has that face in quarter turn that, just barely, refuses to engage you. Ada, too, has moved on in the rain. It has the flat, bright reds of her patterned scarf and kerchief, set against the color of her eyes. It has the brighter blue of the umbrella, but only on the underside, where it can make an impact without stealing the show. The top is gray, as are the long, dark streaks that anchor a quiet street, while unnaturally long raindrops pour down.

A billboard has a tough task, to catch your eye while you are driving fast. So does a movie, in which no one frame can last, or a fashion ad before you turn the page. Can painting keep up? It can for Katz, who speaks of his admiration for "quick things passing." His retrospective, "Gathering," gathers work from a lifetime by an artist now in his nineties. But then you can always look down from the ramp to the lobby, knowing that a blue umbrella is going everywhere and nowhere fast.

Not exactly boasting

Lennon was not exactly boasting. He was way too ironic by disposition, and the Beatles had enjoyed Beatlemania less and less. It had them retreating into their hotel rooms in New York, and they gave up touring altogether right around the time of that interview. At the quote's end, he says merely that he has no idea which will die first, Christianity or rock and roll. He means only his certainty that religion was on its way out. But then Andy Warhol himself mixed qualms about popular culture with an abiding faith in its importance, for others and for his art.

Still, he had faith in something else as well. He had an upbringing in the Eastern Church in Pittsburgh. Remember his silkscreens of The Last Supper? A reproduction after Leonardo da Vinci hung in the family living room (not, to be sure, at nearly the same scale). He attended Catholic church near his studio or the Episcopalian Cathedral of Saint John near Columbia University all but weekly, if always briefly, in New York. He sought an audience at the Vatican, only to find himself just one among many waiting for a brief encounter and a blessing. The energy and density of Crowd must have taken on new meaning.

The curators, José Carlos Diaz and Carmen Hermo, see a tension throughout his career, between an abiding faith and a sense of exclusion—not just at the Vatican, but as a gay male in the church. Still, it pretty much sticks to faith over doubts, turning to lesser works to make its case. It has sketches from his early years as a commercial artist, including an angel with trumpet out of Renaissance art. It has a photo from back home and a still bigger surprise. His mother, Julia, came with him to New York, pursuing her own habits as an artist. Her drawings look clumsy by comparison, but they point to a continuity in his life and art.

They also mess up the museum's own thesis. Just for starters, the scope and direction of influence are open to question. His mother did not just demand faith, but also turned to silkscreens very much like his. Things get messier still as the opening leaps ahead to a 1985 silkscreen after Raphael and the Sistine Madonna, interrupted with the equally colorful fragment of an ad with a sale price (only $6.99). Does it critique the commercialization of the true church, or did Warhol invest way too much in commercial culture himself—way more, in fact, than the Pop Art of James Rosenquist. He might have been celebrating how religion reaches a broader public or how hard it is for religion to keep up.

Warhol was not saying, with his usual studied naiveté. From that moment on, the show bends over backward to squeeze his body of work under the heading of "Revelation," but just what does it reveal? As with Raphael up front, it throws chronology to the wind, from the 1960s to Warhol's last decade. It has films like Chelsea Girls from 1966, in which it spots a Christian image or two buried in more than three hours. Still, for all its insights, it stretches to fill out its theme, in a show that is likely to go by all too fast. It may sell Warhol short as well.

Does he silkscreen Easter Eggs? Sure, but just what does that say, and how does it fit alongside his Orange Dessert, a dollar sign, and boxes for ketchup? When he calls himself the "Leonardo of shoes," is he boasting or complaining? Can a museum afford to boast or complain, in offering up yet another Warhol survey, catering to its own public? Before it is done, the artist may look a lot less Catholic and a lot more prescient. But then Lennon's mother had the same first name.

Out of the shadows

After mother and home, the show dives into Warhol's women, including Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. But were they Christian—and are they America's true faith? The Kennedy family was Catholic, but Monroe converted to Judaism on marrying Arthur Miller. And her death was a crisis for the playwright and for popular culture, but not for faith. Warhol also initiated a series of nursing women, but abandoned it. Was he disappointed that they did not live up to the Madonna, or did he find that image simply irrelevant?

The section on women also introduces the Factory, with all its talent show. Film collaborators include Candy Darling, whose transgressive sexuality aligns with Warhol's but without a doubt. They also include Valerie Solanis, who shot Andy Warhol, a deranged act with confused motives. Politically correct to a fault, the museum laments that it overshadows her radical feminism. Ouch.

It brought Warhol close to death, a closeness that he could never forget. Increasingly, too, death and disaster take over the exhibition, much as they dominated "Regarding Warhol," a 2012 show at the Met of his influence. There will be a photo by Richard Avedon of his scarred stomach, in a section titled "The Catholic Body." There will be guns, knives, skulls, and sunsets—and unprecedented museum attention to Warhol's Shadows from the 1980s. One should never again dismiss him as cheap and glib. Still, how exactly do they bear on his faith?

He was surely not treating himself as a Christ figure. Besides there has to be more to Christianity than the death of a god—or did Warhol edit out the rest? Along with The Last Supper, the show has a silkscreen after an early Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci, but with barely a trace of the angel or Mary. It also has work after the most famous Leonardo of all, the Mona Lisa. But then what could be more secular than that? Or does the crowd at the Louvre attest to how popular culture has the status of a god?

Has Warhol himself? The question remains open for the Leonardo of shoes, and it deepens a show never quite able to ask. The artist himself might have said no—although he did count on that private interview with the pope. He cared too much about the banality at the heart of culture or life. The museum compares Chelsea Girls to reality TV, but it runs on split screens for all that time without an interruption. It throws time itself to the winds.

And yet somehow his work keeps asking. It can never overcome life's cheap pleasures or art's grander ones, no more than anyone. Warhol's Shadows evoke Abstract Expressionism, but do they bask in it or parody it? Can they ever escape the beauty of color or the darkness? Perhaps his greatest skill lies in that apparent naiveté in refusing to say. So does the serious impact of a seriously flawed show.

Passing fancies

A very different style of postwar painting, too, makes a point of first impressions and a mural scale. Alex Katz came of age in Abstract Expressionist New York and admired Jackson Pollock most of all. In a busy, early easel painting, people are his drips. He differs from Warhol, too, by painting from life. To top it off, work from his last twenty-five years can approach abstraction. Big paintings depict offices at night, their streaky windows barely breaking the black, gray trees against gray windows, and sunset as single field of yellow.

Still, these scenes evoke real places, in Lower Manhattan and Katz's summer home since 1954, in Maine. The office building is a corner view, asserting its mass even as you yourself turn the corner. Besides, his greatest affection is for people, starting with his mother at a kitchen table in 1946. A blue window frames her head. A subway scene reflects his own commute from Queens to study art (and his future wife is from the Bronx). When, later, he paints a cocktail party, you can have no doubt that this is his loft, with his friends and his view across the street.

In between, he discovers the twin pillars of postwar art, big gestures and pop culture. At first he isolates standing figures against matte white, sometimes doubled, like Robert Rauschenberg. Ada has a party almost to herself, in six poses in a black dress, with just one hesitant visitor in a doorway. Katz has his first cutouts as well, with painting glued to its support and the background cut away. The 1960s, though, makes all the difference—with those big, flat colors and deep black. The layering of people and windows creates a real space out of nothing else.

Faces fly by, every one of them a lasting glimpse. They include a man in a black hat, Ada upside-down, a man lost in thought, and a mural for Times Square. Red, blue, and green at left and a red headband at right frame Ada's indelible face. They include, too, the arts circle he knew best—Paul Taylor and his dance company, Edwin Denby (the dance critic) many times over, Yvonne Jacquette (the painter) in a fur hat, and poets like Frank O'Hara and, as he was then known, LeRoi Jones. (One can hear their voices directly in "New York: 1962–1964" at the Jewish Museum.) Still life enters, too, mostly flowers, up close and big.

The ramp has proved inhospitable to many enough artists, much like the rotunda, but you were just passing anyway, right? The curators, Katherine Brinson with Terra Warren, devote its top two floors to work since his Whitney retrospective in 1986. Increasingly, figures give way to nature, figuration to abstraction, and day to night. Trees parallel those of Lois Dodd, a friend and subject, smaller branches flaring out and cutting against the trunk. Splashes of color dart in and out of black. Dogwood trees in Washington Square add their splash of white, and Ada has more and more gray hair.

Still, he has changed less than even he might think. The billboards have just gotten larger, their contrasts deeper but intact. He paints Francesco Clemente in 1992, but do not expect a turn to Clemente's Neo-Expressionism. He is also insistently shallow and upbeat, as with that golden sunset. Is Katz's art too quick and too rosy to last? Their sensation lasts all the same.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Revelation" ran at The Brooklyn Museum through June 19, 2022, Alex Katz at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through February 20, 2023. Five related reviews turn to Warhol, including Warhol's influence and Warhol in retrospective, but I leave other links in the text.