Milan, a major exhibition on Andy Warhol curated by Bonito Oliva in autumn

From October 22, 2022 to March 26, 2023, the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan will host a major exhibition dedicated to Andy War hol (Pittsburgh, 1928 - New York, 1987), entitled Andy Warhol. Advertising in Form, featuring more than three hundred objects divided into seven thematic areas and thirteen sections, and tracing Warhol’s career from his beginnings in the 1950s as a commercial illustrator to his last decade of activity in the 1980s marked by his relationship with the sacred. The exhibition is promoted and produced by Comune di Milano-Cultura and Navigare, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva with Edoardo Falcioni for Art Motors, Partner BMW.

“Warhol,” says Bonito Oliva, “is the Raphael of American mass society who gives surface to every depth of the image thus making it immediately usable, ready for consumption like any product that crowds our daily living. In this way he develops an unprecedented classicism in his aesthetic transformation. Thus the publicity of the form creates the epiphany, that is, the appearance, of the image.”

Born Andrew Warhola in 1928, in Pittsburgh, to Slovak parents (Ondrej Warhola and Júlia Justína Zavacká), after graduating in 1949 he moved to New York City, changed his Slovak-sounding name to Warhol, and by the early 1960s was a successful young advertising executive, working for magazines such as New Yorker, Vogue, and Glamour. “The insight that will make him famous and rich,” Falcioni writes in the catalog text, "is to repeat an image over and over again, so that it will forever enter the public’s mind. Thirty Are Better Than One, his first Mona Lisa repeated as many as thirty times, is transformed from a famous and exclusive work of art into a work of all and for all, turning the language of advertising into art. In Green Coca-Cola Bottles we immediately understand that for the artist it is quantity that prevails over the originality of the subject depicted: it is in fact by repeating the same image that he is able to bring and stage the consumerist landscape in the art world: the artist’s task is no longer to create, but to reproduce."

To do this Warhol adopts a special serialization technique, with the help of a silk-screen printing machine, which facilitates the creation of the works and greatly reduces production time. On large canvases he reproduces the same image many times by altering its colors: using advertising images of large commercial brands or impactful images such as traffic accidents or electric chairs, he manages to empty them of their original meaning. Art must be “consumed” like any other product. The silkscreen technique is used by Warhol as early as 1962 to create the Campbell’s Soup Cans series, consisting of thirty-two small canvases of identical size each depicting the iconic Campbell’s soup cans , exhibited that same year at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. He does the same with portraits of the celebrities of the time: Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, Marlon Brando, Liza Minnelli, Gianni and Marella Agnelli, Queens Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Margaret II of Denmark, Beatrix of the Netherlands, Iranian Empress Farah Pahlavi, Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco, Princess Diana Spencer of Wales. For these personalities being portrayed by Wahrol became an imperative to confirm their social status. Emblematic is Gold Marilyn Monroe, preserved at the MoMA in New York: one of the most fascinating women in modern American history is depicted here against a gold background, exactly as if it were a fourteenth-century panel painting of the Madonna.

Critics initially panned these works, not understanding their originality, nor understanding Warhol’s desire to communicate the idea of repetition and product abundance, in line with the consumerist philosophy of the time. His work is seen as an outrage against Abstract Expressionism, an art movement then dominant in the US. The famous art dealer Leo Castelli himself at first does not understand the innovative genius of Warhol’s work and yields to Jasper Johns ’ request not to admit him to his stable. In reality, by adhering to mass culture and bringing it into the conceptual world of figurative art, Warhol exalted the home of consumerism and all that the United States symbolized from the postwar period until the 1980s.

“The real stroke of genius through which the artist succeeded in definitively valorizing the 1960s and the new forms of mass communication,” Falcioni’s text further reads, "were, however, the Brillo Boxes: these are sculptures identical to the Brillo boxes of soapy straw flakes sold in supermarkets. These were made by a carpenter’s shop and the edges were silkscreened by Warhol and his assistants like the original labels. It was these works that would trigger in Arthur Danto, a famous philosopher captivated by these creations, his conception about the philosophy of art, which revolves around a fundamental question: ’what is art?’ This question would lead him to consider these wooden boxes as true works of art, by virtue of their ability to evoke and represent to perfection a specific historical context, in this case the 1960s along with its innumerable innovations, of which the pop artist can undoubtedly be considered the greatest interpreter. The event that made these works among the most famous in the entire history of art was the artist’s solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York, held in 1964: these sculptures were arranged within the exhibition space all in a row and one on top of the other, just as if it were a supermarket rather than an art gallery." It was upon visiting this exhibition that Leo Castelli reconsidered and understood the relevance of Warhol’s operation, enlisting in his stable.

From this moment Warhol’s career experiences a deflagration. The famous The Factory is born, originally at 231 East 47th Street, where countless assistants create his mass-produced works at a frenetic pace: paintings, films, music covers, sculptures, magazine covers and more. And where Warhol welcomes actors, musicians, writers, the whole New York creative world, creating early films such as The Velvet Uderground & Nico, for whom he also made the cover of the famous LP. Many other films are made here showing repeated actions dilated in time, sort of paintings projected on a white wall, and the Screen Tests, filmed portraits of people visiting the Factory, filmed, for the purpose of entering their intimacy, with a fixed camera without moving for three minutes on a black background. Some of these films devoted to New York gay culture, of which Warhol was a member, were censored, distributed by word of mouth and screened thirty years after the date of their making at exhibitions held in various museums around the world. The Interview magazine is also produced in the Factory, with the character of the moment on the cover for each issue. And other famous covers are produced for Time and Playboy. Many other Factories will follow in different parts of the city, workshops of the many projects conceived nonstop by the multifaceted artist. In the meantime, a new generation of artists such as Basquiat, Haring, and Scharf was born who considered Warhol their spiritual father: welcoming them into his circle, Warhol absorbed their dynamism and creativity. He thus succeeds in renewing himself anew, devising the latest iconic experiments such as the famous Dollar Sign, emblem of the economic rampantism of those years, abandoning the use of silkscreen printing and devoting himself, reinterpreting in a pop key some artistic references of the past, to pure painting.

The Milan exhibition aims to document this path: from the objects symbolic of mass consumerism, to the portraits of the star system of the 1960s; from the Ladies & Gentlemen series of the 1970s dedicated to drag queens, the transvestites, a symbol of marginalization par excellence and considered on a par with stars such as Marilyn, up to the 1980s in which his relationship with the sacred becomes predominant: a practicing Catholic, he had actually been pervaded by it all his life. In the exhibition, the public will find on display about 20 canvases, about 50 unique works such as silkscreens on silk, cotton, and paper, as well as drawings, photographs, original records, T-shirts, the Commodore Amiga 2000 computer with its digital illustrations, the BMW Art Car painted by Wahrol, a faithful reconstruction of the first Factory, and a multimedia part with projections of films to be viewed with three-dimensional goggles.

The exhibition opens Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Last admission 30 minutes before closing time. Tickets: 12 euros full price (14 on weekends and holidays), 10 euros reduced (Musei Lombardia Card holders with disabilities and accompanying persons, over 65, ATM and Trenord annual season ticket holders, teachers, young people up to 14, employees of the City of Milan (with nominal badge) journalists with ODG badge with current year’s unaccredited and university students), 16 euros open ticket, 5 euros schools, 8 euros for groups of at least 10 people, free for children up to 5 years old.

Image: Andy Warhol, Untitled (Flowers) (c. 1983-1985; silkscreen on silk, 101.6 x 88.9 cm; Private Collection)

Milan, a major exhibition on Andy Warhol curated by Bonito Oliva in autumn

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