After the First 15 Minutes

“I wish I hadn’t made so many images,” Andy Warhol fretted to a reporter from The Times in 1970, the day before his first big survey exhibition opened to the public at the Pasadena Art Museum. “I wanted the Pasadena show to be one image--the wallpaper with the cow’s heads. One image. That would be nice.”

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the celebrity-mad Pop artist thought it would be so nice to devote an entire museum retrospective exclusively to that one image. The wallpaper features a shocking pink bovine repeated against an electric yellow background. The jaunty cow might at first look like Borden’s Elsie, but the wallpaper is really a cinematic self-portrait of Warhol. How it is, and why that meant so much to him, are questions whose answers take a bit of explaining.

Raised Byzantine Catholic, Warhol understood the power of an icon. He had shown the wallpaper in a room by itself at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, and in 1968 he had used it to cover the entire facade of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden. But Los Angeles was different. For Warhol, L.A. was Mecca. It was Hollywood, where Marilyn, Liz and Elvis--stars of his paintings in the 1960s--lighted up the silver screen.

In 1965, just as his Pop art career was exploding internationally, Warhol had famously announced in Paris that he was giving up painting to focus on making movies. Warhol had become a star, but what he really wanted was to direct.

His work in underground films was flourishing. Cheeky pictures like 1964’s “Empire,” in which the ironic subject of an eight-hour motion picture was an utterly immovable object--Manhattan’s phallic Empire State Building--created a stir in the small arena of avant-garde cinema. His 1966 epic, “The Chelsea Girls,” became a bona-fide art-house sensation, receiving wide distribution and national press. An unscripted mix of documentary narratives about the eccentric denizens of Manhattan’s low-rent Chelsea Hotel, its reels are projected in random order on two screens simultaneously, side by side. “The Chelsea Girls” is Warhol’s “Grand Hotel,” playing out in real-life reel life the famous epigram of that 1932 Hollywood masterpiece: “People come, people go. Nothing ever changes.”

But the underground wasn’t Hollywood, no matter how wide the distribution. In spring 1969, Columbia Pictures approached Warhol and his friend Paul Morrissey, and expressed interest in producing a mass-market film. The title of the project Warhol and Morrissey pitched was “The Truth Game,” and the plan was to cast the beautiful transvestite, Candy Darling as a Life magazine reporter who interviews movie stars. Their proposal was soon rejected for “moral reasons.”

For Warhol to return in triumph the next year with a lavish museum retrospective starring the cow wallpaper would be sweet, indeed.

Why? Because Picasso, universally acclaimed the greatest artist of the 20th century, had spent much of his career depicting himself in the guise of a strong and powerful bull. The sexually voracious Spaniard had executed hundreds, maybe thousands, of paintings, drawings and prints of the potent male animal. They range from his traumatic 1937 landmark, “Guernica,” in which the mighty bull looks on implacably at the convulsive chaos of war, to countless pictures of Minotaurs in romantic, surreal and mythic narratives.

Warhol’s quiescent cow, pretty in pink, was El Toro’s feminine alter ego. He repeated his cow persona hundreds, thousands of times in a wallpaper pattern. Wallpaper was the taboo stuff of interior decoration, the marginal art form to which women and gay men had been restricted by a nervous sexist society. But its vertical lines of repeated images also look like frames of film. Warhol didn’t manage to get a transvestite superstar into a mainstream Columbia film, but the Pasadena show could be its own uptown Hollywood epic, starring Warhol in famous-artist drag.

The wallpaper plan, whether idly voiced to a reporter or actually proposed to the museum, was not to be. The Pasadena show instead included a full complement of Warhol’s art of the 1960s. The cows were there, but so were paintings of Jackie Kennedy in mourning, colorful flowers in close-up, rows of Campbell’s soup cans, electric chairs in stark rooms, Brillo boxes piled high, tabloid photographs of horrific car crashes, more conventional self-portraits and the rest. All of these and more will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday. The mammoth Warhol retrospective, featuring more than 250 works from 1942 until his death at 58 in 1987, arrives from London for a three-month run in Los Angeles, its only American stop.

Yet the cow is as telling for Warhol’s art as the bull is for Picasso’s. The same spirit that infused the wallpaper characterizes almost all of Warhol’s work from mid-1962 to 1968. Those five or six years constitute his most brilliant, inventive and sustained period as an artist--a torrent that was interrupted on June 3 by a gun-toting crazy named Valerie Solanas, whose bullet to the abdomen almost killed him.

Warhol’s art is usually considered a commentary on the banality of commercial popular culture. In fact, it harnesses the power of pop imagery to articulate ideas about art. His greatest masterpieces are, like his Picassoid cow, a virtual textbook of established assumptions about modern art. The common cultural beliefs and artistic cliches of the day, whether critically held by artists in their studios or lackadaisically voiced by an indifferent American public, are pictured in his sly paintings.

It’s hard to imagine anyone more ill-suited than Warhol for the New York School of the ‘50s. He’d gotten a few small gallery exhibitions, but his art career was going nowhere. Try to picture Warhol--a shy, pallid, effeminate homosexual and one of the most successful commercial artists in Manhattan--holding his own in a drunken night of rough-and-tumble argument about avant-garde art at the Cedar Street Tavern, the legendary downtown watering hole for Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and other Abstract Expressionist artists. (“How gay was Warhol?” asked poet Wayne Koestenbaum. “As gay as you can get.”) By 1960, postwar painting was exhausted, sliding into the historical past, and debates were raging about what it meant, where it was going, whether abstraction had a future and more. What could Warhol do?

In essence, what Warhol did as a painter in the 1960s was little different from what he did as an award-winning illustrator for I. Miller shoes and “Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette” in the 1950s. He used painting to mount a veritable ad campaign, which “sold” conventional ideas about the arcane world of avant-garde art.

The vivid mythology of 1940s and ‘50s Abstract Expressionist painting, which had catapulted American art into international prominence, is central to Warhol’s chosen imagery of the 1960s. If he could successfully illustrate rules of etiquette and advertise immaterial ideas about fashion, why couldn’t he do the same for existential dread and the established rules of advanced American painting?

Pop art is an inventory of New York School ideas about Modern art, told in the visually exciting language of American mass media. Like any ad campaign, it had a limited shelf life--in Warhol’s case, less than six years--before repetitiveness and musty familiarity set in. But its success was staggering. The inventory is rich, so rich that art has not been the same since.

Any guide to what Warhol was selling, as well as how he sold it, should start with his series of “do it yourself” landscape paintings. Their designs were based on commercial paint-by-numbers kits, a toy introduced in 1951 that soon became a national fad. Andy’s do-it-yourself paintings recognize the scornful popular assumption that when it comes to Modern art, “My 5-year-old child could do that!”

Cliches and puns are essential to understanding Warhol. His painted sculptures of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes cartons make an awful play on words: The artistic technique of repeating one form over and over, pioneered by Impressionist Claude Monet in paintings of haystacks, went by the name of serial imagery. Warhol used Kellogg’s for cereal imagery.

Some pictorial puns were more obscure. Abstract Expressionist artists sloshing paint around their canvases in the studio used a variety of slang terms for the results--paintings that worked had juice, those that didn’t turned to soup. Warhol turned to Campbell’s, both for paintings of soup and painted boxes of tomato juice. (He also did Mott’s apple juice.)

And then there was the Brillo box--an orator’s soapbox, yes, but more than that. James Harvey, a commercial graphic artist who also had an active career as an exhibiting Expressionist painter in New York, designed the Brillo box. Warhol, a successful commercial artist who had a hard time getting anyone to take his art seriously, could relate.

He first displayed his black-and-white paintings based on dance diagrams for the waltz, the fox trot and other ballroom favorites flat on the floor, rather than hanging on the wall. They map the agile movements of titanic “action painter” Jackson Pollock, who “danced” around canvas spread on the floor and artfully dripped paint. (One complex diagram also probably refers to “Tango,” a 1955 painting by Jasper Johns.)

Easel painting had been widely denounced in favor of big, mural-size canvases, known as field paintings for their capacity to encompass a viewer’s field of vision. Big, bright color-abstractions by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Barnett Newman were said to embody its most refined form. Warhol made Color-field paintings of a rather more literal kind, reproducing a seed-catalog photograph of colorful hibiscus flowers.

Black paintings formed a subset within the abstract art of the period. Pollock had made a controversial switch to black paintings in 1951, facing a creative block after his series of monumental “drip” paintings. Ad Reinhardt made black squares his signature motif in 1956. Young Frank Stella was being hailed as the savior of abstract art for a series of black paintings begun in 1958. Warhol made black paintings too, but his were ripped from the headlines: race riots in Birmingham, Ala., reproduced in a Life magazine photograph of a clash between civil rights demonstrators and police.

When he selected gory tabloid newspaper photographs of car crashes to reproduce on canvas, he showed the violent means of death for 1950s cultural heroes, from Pollock to James Dean.

One of Warhol’s first Pop series used rubber stamps and a silk-screen printing process to reproduce dollar bills on canvas. Abstract Expressionism was the first modern American art movement to establish a flourishing international market. American painting had become currency. Andy started printing money.

Ab Ex touted its rigorous commitment to subject matter that is “tragic and timeless.” Who fit that bill better than Marilyn Monroe, the goddess suicide; Elizabeth Taylor, repeatedly hospitalized and scandalously divorced; and Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s stylish, valiant widow? Marilyn, Liz and Jackie became Warhol’s substitutes for the powerful women featured in paintings by De Kooning, the other artist-titan of the 1950s.

The tragic and the timeless, with their overtones of death and despair in the face of subjective individual freedom, were integral to the existentialism so influential to abstract painters like Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Warhol painted the bleak void where the electric chair conferred America’s final judgment on society’s losers (including 1950s “celebrity victims” like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). In the upper right-hand corner of the electric-chamber photograph Warhol chose to reproduce hangs a blunt, admonishing sign: It declares Samuel Beckett’s famous “silence.”

Abstract Expressionism was infamous as a macho boy’s club of swaggering, hard-drinking men engaged in a pursuit--the arts--not noted in American society as a masculine activity. Warhol pictured the conflicted type: Marlon Brando, the tough-but-tender motorcycle hood in “The Wild One,” and Elvis Presley, a misfit pretty boy and gunslinger in the 1960 western “Flaming Star” (a movie title that’s as gay as you can get).

This mixture of masculine aggression and homoerotic desire proved too much for the 1964 World’s Fair, where Warhol’s 25-panel commissioned work depicting the NYPD’s “13 Most Wanted Men” was painted over by nervous officials of the New York State Pavilion.

The “Most Wanted Men” made an obvious pun on pinup boys. But they also refer to Marcel Duchamp, the emigre French Dada artist newly emerged from obscurity as a hero to a younger generation of post-Ab Ex artists. His career was based on puns. Warhol met the living legend in L.A. in 1963, just before he got the World’s Fair commission, when Duchamp was the subject of a celebrated retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The ad sheet for that show took the form of a Wild West poster, featuring Duchamp’s picture as a wanted outlaw. It cited his alias as Bull.

Bovine Andy wasn’t alone in using the visual language of mass culture to represent dead cliches about modern art and giving it vivid new life in the process. Two others who did the same were Roy Lichtenstein, working with comic books in New York, and Edward Ruscha, working with graphic design and advertising techniques in Los Angeles.

Nor did current art events suddenly become his subject in 1962. The year before, he had painted “Telephone,” now part of MOCA’s permanent collection. It depicts an antique phone, the kind with a separate earpiece and a mouthpiece on a stand, a model that had been replaced by the then-ubiquitous rotary dial telephone. For a mass-media world, a more blatant depiction of painting as an obsolete form of communication is difficult to imagine.

In mid-1962, “129 Die in Jet! (Plane Crash)” showed the June 4 cover of the tabloid New York Mirror. The tragic (if not timeless) newspaper story had a veiled art connection, for a group of patrons from the High Museum in Atlanta had been on board that fateful flight from Paris. High art supporters were doomed.

The telephone and plane crash paintings--like the 32 cans of Campbell’s soup with which Warhol launched his Pop career at L.A.’s Ferus Gallery in 1962--were transitional works because they were painted by hand.

When he started printing movie star and money pictures, Warhol moved in a direction Robert Rauschenberg was also taking. Warhol began perfecting a silk-screen technique for printing photographs in paint on canvas. Mass production merged with high art.

Actual media images, which had previously had no aesthetic legitimacy, began to occupy the privileged space of painting. Thus did Warhol end a conflict between painting and photography that raged since 1839, when fixed camera images were invented. Now, photography was masquerading as painting. Warhol’s photo silk-screen paintings are art’s equivalent to James Slattery all done up in drag as Candy Darling.

In the catalog to the show opening Saturday at MOCA, Kirk Varnedoe, former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, writes that Warhol’s paintings show a taste for crude, anonymous, out-of-date trash, like old product labels, seed catalog pictures and B-movie stills. “This taste for the retrograde cliche was consistent with a strain apparent in Modern art since Picasso began using newspaper clippings in 1912, whereby the hot new art style of the moment exploited the deadest and most shopworn elements of the commercial culture around it.”

Varnedoe is right about Picasso, but he’s only half-right about Warhol. For Warhol’s Pop uses those commercial images to take advantage of the deadest, most shopworn elements of high culture. New York School painting had been theorized as a heroic defense against the degradation supposedly inherent in pop culture. The avant-garde battled kitsch. But Warhol understood that a great Hollywood movie (or a great work in any pop genre) is as culturally rich and satisfying as a great painting--and equally as rare.

As a functional worldview, the modern trait of assigning value according to category--high art over low art, not to mention male over female, straight over gay, rich over poor, religionist over atheist, white over black/brown/yellow/red--was dead. (That’s one big reason death is the most common subject in Warhol’s art.) Warhol was the first court painter of American democracy. His cow outran the old bulls of Picasso and even Duchamp. And that’s why Warhol matters.

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“Andy Warhol Retrospective,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A. Show hours: Tuesday-Wednesday and Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tickets: Adults: $12, weekdays; $17, weekends; children 12 and younger: $6, weekdays; $8, weekends. (213) 365-3500.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.