Warhol showed up 45 minutes late, screened 30 minutes of an erotic film he'd made and then delivered not a lecture as advertised but a few terse, uncommunicative answers to audience questions. Hiding behind dark sunglasses, he looked impatient and bored. Many outraged audience members (who'd paid $2 to get in) demanded refunds.
As some observers suspected and later confirmed, the "lecturer" wasn't Warhol but an impostor, an actor the artist had hired to portray him at the U. and three other campuses on what was supposed to be a speaking tour of the American West.
In this way, Time magazine reported the following year, Warhol "was offering the public another medium of pop art. The deception was not essentially different from producing soup cans and Brillo boxes in wood and paint. Pop art is premised, after all, on the belief that the surfaces of things are what really matter."
Forty years later almost to the day, Warhol is finally appearing at the University of Utah. Not in person, of course - he died in 1987 - but through a major exhibition of his artwork titled "Andy Warhol's Dream America," opening Thursday at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The touring show gathers 88 of his prints, including iconic images of Campbell's soup cans and his portraits of Mao and Marilyn Monroe, into a colorful array of pop art that comments on our continuing obsessions with consumerism and celebrity.
The show's title refers to Warhol's boyhood dreams about "the fantasy corners of America [that] seem so atmospheric because you've pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you've custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one."
The exhibition comes to Utah from the Oregon-based Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, which owns some 300 of Warhol's works. Reached by phone last week, Jordan Schnitzer said he began acquiring Warhol's prints 20 years ago through galleries and auction houses and considers Warhol the most significant artist of the latter half of the 20th century.
The Pittsburgh-born Warhol moved to New York City as a young illustrator in 1949, but it was not until the 1960s that he became famous. In 1962 Warhol started creating images through a silk-screen printing technique that most artists avoided because of its use in commercial advertising. Screenprinting, as it was known, proved to be the perfect medium for making multiple images on all types of surfaces. It also made it easy for Warhol to transfer photographic images and tweak them with squiggly lines and splashes of color.
To illustrate this, the UMFA exhibition will feature 10 prints from his 1968 soup-can series, each depicting a different flavor, from tomato to cream of mushroom. It also includes 10 prints from Warhol's famous 1967 Marilyn Monroe series; 10 prints of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, completed in 1972; and 10 portraits of rock star Mick Jagger.
With the Mao and Marilyn prints, Warhol began with the same stock photographic image and colored the skin, hair and lips to create different looks. The Jagger series, on the other hand, contains 10 poses, all captured by Warhol during a 1975 photo shoot at his famous Factory studio.
"By brashly declaring, 'I want to be a machine,' Andy Warhol shifted the direction of the history of art from a reverence for the original, one-of-a-kind object to the reluctant acknowledgment of mass-produced, mass-manufactured masterpieces," says UMFA curator Mary Francey. To Francey, Warhol's prints made "recognizable and relevant statements about the anesthetizing effects of repetitive images generated by contemporary media."
Also in the show are a 1977 self-portrait; images of such diverse figures as actress Sarah Bernhardt and Apache leader Geronimo; still lifes of shoes, a buffalo nickel, a bunch of grapes and other mundane objects; and a somber portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy drawn from a news photo of the bereaved first lady after her husband's 1963 assassination.
The "Jackie" print, along with Warhol's initial Marilyn series, begun within weeks of Monroe's suicide in 1962, reflects the artist's tabloidlike fascination with celebrity and tragedy. This focus, along with Warhol's keen understanding of the mass media's role in shaping how we view pop culture, suggests the artist may have been ahead of his time. It's not hard to imagine a modern-day Warhol doing silkscreen portraits that comment on the tragic superficiality of Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears.
Schnitzer, the collector, believes "Andy Warhol's Dream America" speaks to the hopes and fears of Americans in 2007 as eloquently as it did 30 or 40 years ago.
"His themes are more relevant today than ever," he says. "And that's the true test of an artist."
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* BRANDON GRIGGS can be contacted at griggs@sltrib.com or 801-257-8689. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
No impostors
* "ANDY WARHOL'S DREAM AMERICA" opens Thursday at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City. The show will continue through Jan. 6. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and kids ages 6-18 and free for children 5 and under. Admission is free for everyone the first Wednesday of every month. For more information, call 801-581-7332 or visit www.umfa.utah.edu.
