Andy Warhol, Campbells Soup, 1968, Wolverhampton Art Gallery (©Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts)
Andy Warhol is too famous. Everyone thinks they know his work, and him, to the point that it is very easy to simply stop looking and engaging. To this end, I nearly did not bother to go to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, to see that I thought would be an exhibition of second-string prints. This is a cautionary tale which proves that art, all art, is best viewed in person and if you ever get the chance to go and look for yourself, grab it. Artist Rooms is a wonderful initiative from Tate and National Galleries Scotland which allows regional collections to access a stock of prints and drawings and in this case they are working with a collection which is renowned for its own, mainly British, Pop Art holdings. The resulting exhibition is bigger, fresher and more enlightening than I had possibly imagined.
Wolverhampton provides an excellent home-grown, warm-up act with a separate display of their own Pop holdings. From a clever rejigging of Cubism by Roy Lichtenstein, to a classic Bridget Riley and the psychedelically bright Longue March, this room is the Sixties objectified. The display area, dark walled and less cool than severely air conditioned, is too dingy to really showcase the vibrancy of the works but they twist and shout regardless. Pop is often dismissed as bubblegum art, unthinking and as disposable as the culture it was commenting on, yet nothing could be further from the truth. From the luridly violent slashes across Allan Jones' table-dancing dummy to Jim Rosenquist's anti-war F-111 these works have complexity as well as colour. And there is a subliminal boast from the Wolverhampton curators too: they have their own Warhol of Jackie Kennedy included here. Artist Rooms loans are a bonus, not a necessity.
Andy Warhol, Liz, 1965, National Galleries of Scotland (©Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts)
In fact, the gallery's second Warhol - Campbells Soup - opens the Artists Rooms display, part of a run of advert-inspired prints which lull you into thinking you know what you are about to get. Look again and the flash brashness of the billboard is undercut by the fragile ephemerality of the print paper and the handmade glitches. Almost immediately, the tone shifts further with a series of Warhol film posters, a combination of seventies post-hippy glamour and unsettling sleaze. Warhol's difficult relationship with feminism - his shooting by an activist is repeatedly referenced - and women in general, cuts through much of the show. But the unease is broader and permeates most of the exhibits, in the monumentalised pistols and electric chair repeats. It is at its most acute in the angsty, faux-disguised self-portraits of a man who seems to both seek out and cower from his fame.
Scale and colour are repeated, some might argue overused, tropes but one might say the same about a lot of artists throughout history. Here the scale is supersized Americana, the colour the simplified blocks of machine printing and the impact is undeniable. Marilyn's frozen smile in lurid negatives, so familiar yet still able to pack a punch - endless manipulation, endlessly unnatural, all surface because no one was interested in the depth. Sometimes the message is delivered with brutal crudeness - Mao undercut by lipstick, Ali with stand-out colour fists, but these big screen prints have subtlety too - slowly disintegrating before our eyes as the ink bleeds and the shadows close in. Equally, there are drawings, delicately elegant nameless young men sniffing flowers like fin de siecle dandies, Mick Jagger so androgynous you have to look twice, Robert Mapplethorpe caught rabbit-like in the headlights. A wonderful, poignant image of a young Hockney was traced from a projection on a wall, a method which captures his mercurial enthusiasm for innovation as much as the physical likeness.
The scale ramps up further in the last two rooms. Abstracted camouflage wallpaper doing exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to. Missile bases and paratrooper boots stripped back to monochrome, chillingly cartoonish. The Cold War is as ever present as seediness in the flipside of the American Dream. Big Brother is always on your shoulder. The exhibition's title suggests a bit of frivolity, but maybe the curators intend Art Star to be as double-edged as most of the works on show. If you thought you knew Andy Warhol, go to Wolverhampton and think again.
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