Warhol Paintings Revitalize the Aesthetic of the Everyday World

Andy Warhol's soup cans, Brillo boxes, films, wallpaper, and his floating helium Clouds await Boston gallery-goers at the Institute of Contemporary Art through Sunday. November 6. The Institute, at 100 Newbury St. in Boston, is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11-6 and Wednesday evenings until 9.

Adults, watching a production of Hamlet, realize that the action is limited to the stage. They know, in reality, that Sir Laurence Olivier won't poison Michael Redgrave. They accept a dramatic illusion of reality in order to become involved with the plot and enjoy the play. In all art forms, an audience enters the fantasy world of the artist through this aesthetic illusion.

Each art form has its own way of facilitating participation in the aesthetic illusion. When painting, an artist creates this illusion through color, composition, and form. By representing an imaginative setting far removed from any ordinary view of everyday life, or by using paint to interpret a subject in very personal terms he can force his viewer to make an inventive leap into the emotional context of the painting. The artist can also use visual illusions of space to encourage this inventive leap. A frame, for example, gives the picture an illusion of infinite space behind the picture frame, as if the frame were a window looking into the painter's imaginative world. In short, the viewer understands that the artist imaginatively recreates a setting which has nothing to do with the immediate surroundings of the gallery in which the painting hangs.

The idea is to keep the paintings free from any personal touch which might be more meaningful to the artist than to a random viewer.

The art of Andy Warhol has no such frame or illusion of space, and its subject matter comes directly out of the viewer's immediate environment. Warhol's subjects are Brillo boxes, movie queens, and the obvious objects of everyday life. His art denies the traditional aesthetic illusion.

In an effort to define their paintings within a limited pictorial space, many of the abstract-expressionist painters, in the fifties, dispensed with frames altogether. Without frames, their pictures lose the illusionistic window effect and, rather than continuing off into an imaginary pictorial space behind a frame, they stop at the edges of the canvas and are entirely contained within it. In effect, these paintings become objects contained within the room in which the viewer is standing. Though his motives are different, Warhol uses the same technique to form a continuum between the space and environment of his pictures and the proximate surroundings of his viewers.

The earliest antecedents of this breakdown of the spatial illusion in painting are the pointillist pictures of the late nineteenth century -- particularly Seurat and Signac. They tried to break down the illusion of space by treating the frame with the same minute dots of color which cover the background of the pointillist canvas. As a result, the frame fuses with the canvas, giving the impression of no frame at all.

The origin of Warhol's breakdown of illusionistic subject matter goes back to Robert Rauschenberg, painting in the fifties. Rauschenberg was the first painter to incorporate everyday objects directly into the composition of his paintings. Jasper Johns developed on this approach by focusing on familiar objects individually so that the objects became the center of interest rather than a visual component of a larger composition. Jasper Johns' painting of Three Flags is one of the first completely static paintings in modern art. Its lack of visual movement, makes it an almost emblematic representation. Yet, both Rauschenberg and Johns handle paint with an individual expressive style.

Warhol's style, on the other hand, is distinctly unexpressive and unindividual. As he associates his paintings to the familiar surroundings of his viewer--spatially and with the objects he represents--he also attempts to remove any sign of individual or personal involvement in production. The idea is to keep the paintings free from any personal touch which might be more meaningful to the artist than to random viewer. Some of his early pieces--like the dollar bills--are made with a rubber stamp, but more re- cently he has begun to reproduce his paintings with silk screen. For Warhol, the silk screen process provides an ideal method of mass production because the artist remains almost entirely uninvolved. He selects a photograph, and his associates fabricate silk screens from the photo and press paint through the screens to produce a batch of Warhol "originals" in a multitude of sizes and colors. The Warhol collector must decide for himself how many "same-units" should hang together and in what pattern they should be hung.

Warhol paintings, because they lack any quality of illusion, or personal emotional involvement, are decorative rather than imaginative experiences for the viewer. But seen in this light, they demonstrate taste and skill. Their bright colors and attractive design put them in a class with Danish furniture or Florentine leather; they improve the visual quaity of our environment and perhaps they even stimulate an examination of everyday surroundings in terms of aesthetic values. They do not, however, intend to evoke the imaginative emotional response which is experienced through literature or traditional styles of painting.

Warhol's art-work does not present itself as a challenge to the eclat of Da Vinci and Rembrandt. Rather than attempting to sweep the viewer into the inventive world of the artist, Warhol's painting is a creative attempt to bring a sense of color and design back into daily life