Pop Till You Drop

In February 1972, Richard Nixon went to China. Our cold-warrior-in-chief made nice with the Communist dictator. The trip was a media triumph.

Not long after Nixon’s journey, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) began a series of portraits of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong in China’s current Pinyin spelling). They range from monumental canvases, some nearly 15 feet tall, to yards of wallpaper whose pattern endlessly repeats the chairman’s placid face. Warhol was an artist who knew a good bit about mass media.

In the magnificent retrospective exhibition opening Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, his Mao still packs a wallop.

The silk-screen paintings are based on the famous photograph used in the frontispiece to the Chinese leader’s Little Red Book of revolutionary sayings. Warhol gave Mao the same make-over of lush color, off-register highlights and general theatrical dazzle that he applied to Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor in the 1960s. There was just one appreciable difference.

Mao was more famous. Leader of a nation whose population approached 700 million souls, he was instantly recognizable to more people than even Marilyn, Jackie or Liz. Warhol’s last great suite of paintings consecrated the ultimate celebrity. Popular culture got an indelible, revolutionary poster boy--and that fellow was as much Warhol as Mao. Nixon was opening the door to China, and Warhol was the first one through it.

Today, a couple of generations after the fact, it can be difficult to recognize just how revolutionary were Warhol’s paintings of celebrities, tabloid newspapers and commercial products like Campbell’s soup. By 1960, when he began the work that established him as one of the most important artists of the 20th century, avant-garde art was the bitter enemy of pop culture. The very form of avant-garde art had been established in direct opposition to it. A concept of high culture, which derived from European intellectual tradition, required a reciprocal idea of low culture in order to exist.

Warhol obliterated the distinction. Culture wasn’t high or low, his Pop art baldly asserted. Culture’s products were thrilling or boring, powerful or numb, illuminating or degrading, imbecilic or smart, resonant or thin, beautiful or ugly, good or bad--and sometimes both at once. Making the argument is what mattered.

In the modern history of world culture, the rejection of a categorical division between high and low was a singular contribution of American democracy. Warhol’s art declared this truth to be self-evident.

At MOCA, the story of how he did it unfolds in a knockout display. The show is big--more than 250 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints--and it occupies every gallery of the museum.

Happily playing against today’s depressing museum norm, the show includes not one didactic wall label in any gallery, beyond a four-paragraph introduction at the start. (Useful information is available in an auditorium lobby display downstairs, and naturally there is an optional audio tour. My advice: See the show first, then get the audio tour if you must.)

Warhol’s art is not about reading text and promoting the primacy of ideas; it’s about the persuasive power of visual excitement. Warhol sure had it, and the exhibition wisely defers.

Two things you should know about Warhol: He was hugely successful as a commercial artist in the advertising world of the 1950s, and he was gay. Sexuality plays a critical role in the work of many artists, from Michelangelo to Cathy Opie, and homosexuality is central to Warhol’s art.

Homosexuality was to American society what commercial pop culture was to American avant-garde art: an object of ridicule and contempt. Warhol, having lived the cruel failure of America’s promise of freedom and equality, could physically embody the condition in his work.

The first paintings in the exhibition show him trying to sort things out. In 1960 and 1961, he painted canvases that attempt to parody Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. A pair of paintings based on newspaper advertisements for a gas water heater and a refrigerator together picture the emotional range of Expressionist art, from passionate heat to icy frigidity. Elsewhere, a medical ad for hernia relief meditates on the anguish of internal pain, while a comic book Superman displays explosive heroic power.

These and other such depictions of the period’s reigning artistic cliches are executed in drippy, scribbled oil, casein, wax and crayon. The mark of the artist’s hand is emphasized. A large selection of drawings from the 1950s, many of them made for commercial advertising projects, show that Warhol wasn’t especially adept as a draftsman. (Most are contour drawings, some made by tracing; stylistically they recall the work of Jean Cocteau.) But he understood graphic punch. That acute discernment continues in the paintings.

“The artist’s hand” was of course another period cliche--perhaps the biggest one of all. Oddly, though, the pairing of unique brushwork and commercial imagery undercuts these paintings’ power. In the contest between the avant-garde and kitsch, Warhol first tried to use “their” technique to render “his” images of “their” subject matter. The result is more pastiche than parody.

In 1962 he dispensed with the handmade look of Abstract Expressionism--and his paintings took off. Using found photographs and a silk-screen process meant that he could emphasize a mechanical sense of mass production. Mass-media pictures and frankly commercial methods entered the privileged space of painting.

Suddenly, he was using “his” technique to render “his” images of “their” subject matter. Warhol overwhelmed the established avant-garde.

The visual effect is simultaneously aggressive and seductive, splashy yet indifferent. Their mechanical quality yields a surface that is cool and aloof, even as Warhol’s carefully chosen color is always sensually indulgent. These are paintings that make great backdrops, perfect for casual perusal during the course of a party, while also rewarding close scrutiny.

Warhol (or his assistants) put down the color first, in broad, flat, hard-edged shapes. Then he screened the photographic print on top, usually in black but sometimes in another color.

Often the under-painting and the screened image are off-register. When the image is repeated in a horizontal row, the repetitions tend to overlap. When they make a grid, it’s almost never exactly square. Ink is distributed unevenly, creating blotches, blurs and streaks. It’s the kind of printing job a commercial client would reject.

In short, everything about these paintings, from their pop culture subjects to the mechanized way they are made, declares itself to be deeply, fundamentally wrong. The freedom to be wrong is a core American value--and Warhol’s paintings are its first great public celebration in 200 years of American art.

The retrospective was organized by Berlin’s New National Gallery--nearly a third of the work comes from public and private collections in Germany--and MOCA is its only American venue.

The show is appropriately weighted toward Warhol’s revolutionary work of the 1960s. More than 120 of the paintings and drawings were made during that extraordinarily productive decade, while only half that number date from between 1970 and his death in 1987. (He succumbed to complications following routine gall bladder surgery.) About 70 drawings from the 1950s complete the array.

One omission is a shocker. New York’s Museum of Modern Art refused to lend the 1962 suite of 32 paintings of Campbell’s soup cans now in its permanent collection. (Several other versions of the icon are on view.)

July marks the 40th anniversary of these paintings’ debut, in a legendary show at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. That show launched Warhol’s career. The artist loved the tabloids--he even started one about celebrities, called Andy Warhol’s Interview--so perhaps the best way to characterize the arrogance of the snub is with a blaring headline: “MOMA to MOCA: Drop Dead!”

The absence of the soup cans isn’t fatal to the survey, given the abundance of other major pieces. But it’s rather like a De Kooning retrospective without “Woman I.” A hole is torn in the show, a pivotal moment for art erased.

In the classic “Self-Portraits” from 1966-67, Warhol showed himself half in shadow with head in hand, two fingers across his lips. The sphinx-like pose is standard iconography for intellectual thought and discernment--think Rodin’s “The Thinker”--wherein the artist makes a sly, knowing gesture against those who dismissed him as a shallow poseur. I may be a pop jester, these self-portraits say, but I’m nobody’s fool.

And of course he wasn’t. Sex and violence are the dominant motifs of his art, because sex and violence are dominant motifs of mass media (and, historically, of painting). This makes for a malleable art of continuously shifting resonance. After the explosive AIDS epidemic, Warhol’s death and disaster images resonated one way. Post-Sept. 11, they resonate another.

At MOCA, a poignant moment comes amid morbid paintings of car crashes, suicides and race riots. Suddenly, the presence of big bold paintings of colorful hibiscus flowers assumes a valedictory air.

As much as in any 17th century Dutch floral piece, in which lush blossoms remind us of fragile vanity and the inevitability of death, Warhol’s flowers have become a touching pop meditation on joyfulness, transience and human mortality. Like all great paintings, his will continue to press themselves into our consciousness in ways we can’t yet even imagine.

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Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A., (213) 626-6222, through Aug. 18. Timed and dated tickets are required: (213) 365-3500; (714) 740-7878, www.ticketmaster .com or at Ticketmaster outlets.