A Soupcon of Soup Cans

The first time I heard of artist Andy Warhol, I thought he was the ultimate pretender.

He once described how he got the idea for a particular series of paintings: "I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked me the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money."

And so he went on to paint dollar signs in various shapes and colours. And when he wasn't painting dollar signs, he was painting cans of Campbell's Soup. 32 different flavours of Campbell's Soup. I really didn't get it. They said he made 'Pop Art', which sounded suspiciously like a polite way of saying that his work was kitsch, not art.

But I have resolved to live life large. So when I found out that an exhibition of Warhol prints was running in Singapore, and that there was no admission fee, I had to go. I'm so glad that I did!

The thing that I had never appreciated before was that through his art Warhol was telling the story of his times. It wasn't Pop Art in the sense that it was lowest-common-denominator product, packaged to sell millions of copies like a New Kids On The Block album. On the contrary, it was art that observed popular culture. A great example is his portrait of James Dean, or rather his portrait of a Japanese poster for the James Dean movie Rebel Without A Cause.

Here's the original poster for the movie (I could not find a Japanese one, but this gives a good idea of what it would have been like).


And here's what Warhol did with it; I love the way he stylized the portrait to make James Dean look even more sullen and aggressive than in the photograph.



Warhol did not just observe, he also commented.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American communists. They were sentenced to death by electrocution in 1951 for passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Julius was strapped to the chair first, and he died quickly. Ethel was not so lucky. She recieved a charge of electricity for 57 seconds but at the end of it she was still alive. Two more charges were passed before she was pronounced dead. Eyewitnesses said that by then smoke was rising from her head.

Warhol made 10 prints based on a press photograph of the death chamber. Individually, each image is intensely haunting.

And when you see all of them displayed side-by-side, the effect is profoundly disturbing.

There were a hundred Warhol prints exhibited and I loved almost every one. I did draw the line at a poster titled How To Tell If You're Having A Heart Attack. It was exactly what it sounds like and incredibly dull. But that was a rare exception in a collection of sheer genius.

So I am now officially a fan of Andy Warhol. I'm a proud purveyor of Pop Art. And my farewell tour of Singapore is off to a flying start!