This is Warhol’s 1973 portrait of the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, from the show that celebrates her at the Museum of Modern Art, through April 21. This is the first of my Pics to appear on BlouinArtinfo.com, so it seemed appropriate to commemorate the moment by featuring an image of a great and daring patron, by the most important artist of the last half century. (Sure, I’m biased: I’m spending the next few years writing Warhol’s biography.)
The occasion also gives me a chance to fight back against the seemingly unkillable cliché that Warhol, like every other portraitist ever deemed worthy of cliché, was all about flattering his subjects by making them look gorrrgeous, dahhhling. That bromide does violence to the reality of the Warhol pictures: Sonnabend, like most Warhol sitters, hardly comes across as a great beauty. A van Dyke or a Sargent Warhol was not, and didn’t want to be.
I also find it hard to imagine that a great sophisticate like Sonnabend would have expected or wanted to own a work that wallowed in such a stale approach. I’d like to think that she was savvy enough to spot the overall homeliness of the work, and revel in it. What Warhol could offer her wasn’t an improved version of Ileana, but a Warholized one. That is, he could offer her the same artistic transformation that he’d effected on Campell’s soup cans and dollar bills and Brillo Boxes: He could take an everyday human and turn her into signature art. That’s what all the sloppy, turgid impasto is really about: It is a sign of generic artification, rather than a functional device for achieving actual aesthetic effects. (God knows the picture would look better without it.) Repeating that brushy mess across the two canvases helps make clear just how arbitrary it is; can one side of the diptych really be said to be any more attractive – or any less ugly – than the other?
By this point in Warhol’s career, he’d realized that to stay on the cutting edge, he'd have to drop traditional aesthetics from his artistic agenda; “business art” would take over instead. After abandoning painting during some of his most creative years, he’d returned to it because he came to believe in its sales, not in its visual, potential. That means that the real privilege that he was offering his sitters wasn’t the chance to own a hand-painted Warhol; the privilege came in paying him for it. By handing over a check, you could play a tiny part in the economic performance that Andy was becoming. (The Sonnabend Collection, ©2013 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
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