ART REVIEW : Warhol Gets His Due in Pittsburgh : Museum Is Largest in U.S. Dedicated to a Single Artist

PITTSBURGH —  In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol used the concepts and techniques of mass-media advertising to repackage and sell established American ideas about art. His Pop was heard ‘round the world.

Starting today, three decades and a wholesale artistic revolution later, Warhol’s remarkable achievement has been enshrined in a splendid new museum, billed as the most comprehensive in the nation devoted to the work of a single artist. Located in the Pennsylvania city of his birth (he died unexpectedly on Feb. 22, 1987, following routine gall-bladder surgery at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center), the museum radiates an all-American theme: Hometown boy makes good.

Warhol was born in this former urban-industrial powerhouse on Aug. 6, 1928, the third son of Andrej and Julia Zavacky Warhola. Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, the Warholas had left the rugged foothills of Eastern Europe, along with fully half the region’s population in the 20 years flanking the turn of the 20th Century, in search of the proverbial better life. Many, like Warhol’s father, found it in the mines and mills of Pennsylvania.

The museum, with its yet-to-be fully opened archival center, will likely become the primary locus for Warhol studies. Two main questions have surrounded its genesis. First, would the museum’s art collection include enough first-rate examples to justify the building renovation budget ($12.3 million) and the establishment of a suitable endowment ($20 million)? Second, in what light would his 40-year career be presented?

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Certainly the museum is an exquisite package for Warhol’s art. The ornate Beaux Arts structure, built in 1911 and clad in glazed terra cotta, has been discretely joined by a beautiful three-story addition of concrete, black-glazed structural tile and standard yellow brick--the kind commonly used in old, working-class Pittsburgh. Yellow brick, given its glancing associations with Dorothy Gale traipsing through Oz, is perfect for a Warhol shrine.

Architect Richard Gluckman, best known for his elegantly low-key renovation of loft-building galleries for the Dia Center for the Arts in Manhattan, has followed suit here. Unabashedly modernist, the spare, clean spaces are finished in industrially refined materials such as concrete, aluminum, stainless steel, glass and ocher-colored plaster.

A grand staircase backed by a seven-story wall of translucent glass that floods the interior with filtered light creates a passageway both beautifully inviting and useful: You orient yourself with ease inside the 88,000-square-foot building.

Gluckman has allowed himself one grand flourish. At the entrance, visitors cross an enclosed bridge to the spacious public lobby, arrayed with 25 Warhol self-portraits in a variety of mediums. The bridge, featuring a concrete floor, deep indigo walls and silver-leaf ceiling, gradually narrows in a Brunelleschi-style forced perspective. It subtly echoes the short walk to the museum from the city’s center, across a bridge spanning the Allegheny River.

A glass wall with double doors at the bridge’s narrow end features structural aluminum mullions that create an unobtrusive (but unmistakable) cross, beneath which visitors pass. This processional space enacts a ritualized transition from a mundane urban street on Pittsburgh’s north side into a modern temple to art, mausoleum for an artist.

The museum’s location, its renovated building and useful didactic panels strikingly underscore how Warhol’s Catholic, working class, first-generation American upbringing is critical to understanding his art. In a studio he pointedly called the Factory, Warhol was a modern laborer who mass-produced works of art that dissected--and contributed to--the popular culture of consumption that distinguishes the 20th Century from all others.

Smartly, director Tom Armstrong and curator Mark Francis haven’t separated the artist’s many mediums in the display: advertisements and magazine graphics of the 1950s, which first brought Warhol success as a commercial artist in New York; the brilliant silk-screened paintings, prints and sculptures that brought him art-world fame as a Pop avatar; the extraordinary movies that increasingly occupied him in the late 1960s; the rock band, the Velvet Underground, which he actively promoted, and his disco-decor wallpaper and floating silver pillows; and the fan-magazine, Interview, still published today. In the museum, everything intersects with everything else in a radically democratic manner.

If the crucial socioeconomic context for Warhol’s art is wonderfully conveyed, however, its other defining circumstance is regrettably ignored. Sexuality is often a crucible in which art’s character is formed, but in the Pittsburgh museum the artist’s homosexuality is not acknowledged. Imagine the Picasso Museum in Paris keeping mum about the critical relation between the Spaniard’s heterosexual appetites and his aesthetic, and you’ll have some idea of the egregiousness of the omission.

Take the silk-screened paintings, sine qua non of Pop art, in which photographs are reproduced in paint on canvas, often highlighted with splashes of color. Warhol hit on a sly way to make photographs masquerade as paintings: They’re photographs in drag, complete with makeup enabling them to pass in fashionable society.

Before Warhol, photography had been a second-class citizen in art. Camera images had revolutionized the modern visual environment, but they traditionally occupied a lower rung than painting in art’s established hierarchy.

Warhol turned the tables. The equivalence to his own situation as a homosexual, and thus an actual second-class citizen, is more than mere coincidence.

The museum’s collection numbers about 900 paintings, 70 sculptures, 1,500 drawings, exhibition prints of all his films and videos, rolls of his wallpaper, and more than 500 prints and 400 black-and-white photographs. Together with the commercial art and sketchbooks from the 1950s, they were contributed by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which represents the artist’s estate, and the Dia Center, who, with Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, have collaborated to create the museum.

Much of Warhol’s greatest work is already in other museums and private collections, but the 500 works in Pittsburgh’s inaugural show nonetheless offer a generally substantive, sometimes superb display. Evidence of weakness is usually one of size: Smaller examples are abundant, but they don’t always convey the “mass-ness” of mass production that such larger canvases as the 11 silver portraits of Elvis do effortlessly carry.

Five judicious loans to the inaugural installation also help: a hand-painted Dick Tracy, the classic “Before and After” ad for a nose job, a rare paint-by-numbers image, a monumental portrait of Mao and 55 of the mysterious pictures of shadows and light playing in the corner of an empty room.

The strongest showings are on the sixth and fifth floors, which chronicle the dazzling connections among the commercial art, the early Pop works and the evolution of the Factory. Warhol’s great films (continuously projected on video) are wonderfully integrated into a gallery filled with portraits of media stars, from Marilyn to Jackie.

The flimsiest display is on the second floor. Warhol’s muddled, often corny work from the late 1970s and 1980s includes gruesome attempts at collaboration with Francesco Clemente and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat. Warhol’s tragic death at age 59 voided the possibility of a convincing late period.

If the installation thus ends with a whimper, no matter. Warhol’s own late work might be flimsy, but it’s impossible even to imagine the 1980s at all--bad and good--without his astonishing precedent.

* Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., Pittsburgh, (412) 237-8338; closed Mondays and Tuesdays, except during the inaugural week.