Andy Warhol

It's been 25 years since Andy Warhol died, and the man who gave us the phrase, 15 minutes of fame, is still up there for artists to enjoy and follow.

Next week, he will be even more in the public gaze as his entire estate begins to be auctioned off! The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh - the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist – is exhibiting examples of Warhol’s source material for his works of art, something that should appeal to afficiandos. Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, a retrospective that will travel over two years from Singapore to Tokyo, and indicative of his huge popularity in Asia, is also under way.





Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing a show, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, which features about 45 works by Warhol plus 60 pieces by other artists inspired by him. The exhibition is structured in five thematic sections that aptly describe the world of Warhol: "Daily News: From Banality to Disaster," "Portraiture: Celebrity and Power," "Queer Studies: Shifting Identities," "Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction, and Seriality," and "No Boundaries: Business, Collaboration, and Spectacle."

As the exhibitions kick off to commemorate this important milestone, it is time to reflect on the dramatic, and enduring power of a man who lived totally in his present.

Revisiting Edvard Munch

As I was sorting through our household collection of Great Artists, cataloguing them according to the period/genre, I treated myself by putting aside some to enjoy later. Favorites such as Monet and Seurat and Lowry, but also some that I was unfamiliar with, like Whistler, Hopper, and Burra. And then, there is Edvard Munch. 


Been reading a lot about Munch lately, as he turns 150 next year, and also because of the buzz over the Sotheby sale of one of his Scream series a couple of months ago. Sharing here some insights from an article by Maya Jaggi, that I found interesting. One of the interesting bits was that Munch left his work to the city of Oslo, perhaps to prevent the Nazi government from grabbing it. 

< The Dance of Life

On the forested slopes above the Norwegian capital is a railed path whose sunset view inspired Edvard Munch’s famous vision. The “sky became blood,” he later wrote, and “I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature.” The nearby Ekeberg restaurant has a similar view over the Oslofjord. The setting recurs in other paintings. Munch was barely 30 when he first painted The Scream in 1893. He worked from memory, even in front of a landscape, imbuing it with past perceptions and emotions, painting, he wrote, “not what I see but what I saw.” An anatomist of his psyche, he wrung lifelong motifs from personal experience. But his professed aim was to “dissect what is universal in the soul.”

Munch also painted an astonishing fjord sunrise, reflecting his belief that people should remove their hats before art “as they do in church.” The series was for a competition in 1911, but controversy delayed its hanging for five years. In 1917 Richard Strauss stood entranced by The Sun before raising his baton, and Einstein lectured in its rays.

An unexpectedly joyous frieze was made for the women’s canteen of the Freia chocolate factory, just east of Grunerlokka, in 1923. The 12 bucolic scenes were reinstalled by Munch in 1934 in a wing overlooking a walled garden. This model canteen (now owned by Kraft) can be viewed by appointment. Employees in white hairnets still eat lunch under the frieze.

Read more: Edvard Munch's Oslo

Benita Perciyal

"I started using red marking ink, which was lying in the studio. I was dripping ink on paper; then I connected with the floor, as the studio is full of paint drops. Later Valsan Koorma Kolleri invited a couple of artists to do a project in Kerala, soon after the monsoon. I began seeing fungus everywhere. The paint drop and fungus became the same motif. So that became a part of my landscape."

I find Benita Perciyal a very interesting artist, especially in the way she connects with material and is able to correlate her experiences with her body. In a way, it reminds me of Irom Sharmila, our non-violent freedom fighter from Manipur, who says the only way she can think of a reasonable protest is through her body. Enclose here a part of an interview with Benita Perciyal in The Hindu Arts Magazine, taken during the Chennai Art Summit; ‘Art can come only from personal experience’.

"My father was an ex-serviceman and my mother a teacher. As long as he was alive my father never came to my exhibitions, though I sent him invitations. These he preserved in his Bible and showed his friends and acquaintances and described my exhibitions. Six years ago I organised a camp with a fellow artist for my church. There I made a presentation of my works. He attended the session. When it was over I saw him crying; that moment lives with me even now. But my brothers and sisters make it a point to visit my exhibitions. My immediate family has been very supportive; though the question of survival as a single woman has been a source of worry. But since I am clear about my choice there is nothing more to say. My career was not initiated in a formal way. My artistic process initially was not planned. If I come across something or if something attracts my attention, I get absorbed in it; whether it relates to my work or not. Often I do not work but just sit in the studio. This was the process I went through; now I cannot stop working.

I have always had the feeling of being neglected. So the self occupies a prominent place in my art. Because of this interface with my body, I have gradually been able to understand myself better. Moreover my personality has changed and I have become more open. This is evident in the use of the soft feathery intimate touch of the paper surfaces I now work with, which also extends to the tactile feel of my pet the squirrel that has become a central part of my art and life. So art has led me from a personal restlessness to a state of equilibrium. The role of material came when I began to use the studio space in Lalit Kala Akademi. That was when I did not have money. I had the Lalit Kala scholarship for a year, which was Rs. 3000 a month. I started by using found objects and basic materials like pencils, water colour, poster colour and packing sheets. Since I never wanted or could not connect with the plain surface, I enjoyed these tactile and textured materials.

When I started using rice papers, I understood how important materials were to my process; to conceal as well as reveal. When the colours, particularly tea stains, started to spread on rice paper I was surprised because each time was different; each drop made its own landscape. Later I found everything was silent on the surface. I tore one single piece but left a hole in it. I was afraid to see the hole in the paper so I started to tear the paper separately and dyed them individually and layered them resulting in endless landscapes silently layered in a single imagery. When I was dyeing the paper, the stain penetrated underneath, so I would spread the sheet underneath the rice paper pieces. The result was that so many stains of different days/months layered under the surface that I started looking at the same paint drops or a fungal image into my cycle. Over time it has given me new perspective. One leads into another and that is how my work progresses and develops. I now use kaduka, tea and basic pigments used in kalamkari and materials like seeds, natural glue, handmade paper ... sometimes I work with wood, ceramics, terracotta and fabric.

The colour I use is my body colour; the material has an organic origin like our body. This brown also has negative connotations but when I use it to represent my squirrel or the tree it has a positive energy and makes me feel like I am part of Nature.

Read more
Take a look at Benita's art

Fida

In a way, my choice of the Hindi words Baanvra Mann, to describe the deewanapan, the fortunate world or attitude of an artist, is also influenced by Husain's exuberant art and his own complete rootedness as he wended his way in the bylanes of India. Let's hear him talking now of his early days in Bombay; exciting days of discovery and growth.

"My memories of Chetana date back to 1947 but it is just as if it happened yesterday. It was around that time that I entered the art world. Ara, Souza and others had just formed the Bombay Progressive Artists Group; though I had been in Bombay since 1936 I had never met these people. I joined the group and attended their meetings at Chetana, which was the hub of artistic, literary, creative activities at the time... History should take note of this —Chetana was the nucleus of cultural life not only in Bombay but in India. Writers, painters, theatre people all beat a path to Chetana. Our group included Ara, Souza, Padamsee, Palsikar and even Alqazi who was a painter before he became more involved in the theatre. Our meetings would involve writers like Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, senior actors like Balraj Sahni or a socialist leader like Masani. They were exciting times! Nowadays Bombay has becomes so commercial...

In 1948 I remember the Bombay Art Society used to hold exhibitions but our paintings were rejected because we were not following either the Royal Academy School or the Bengali School. We used to exhibit our rejected work elsewhere or we would paint posters all night in the street. Due to the movement we started in 1948, we succeeded in wiping out these more conventional schools of art by 1960.  Though back then there were very few buyers for our work, even for 50 or 100 rupees. The first Indian collector to recognize our work was Dr Homi Bhabha who started buying contemporary Indian art for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. There was a hue and cry in Parliament as to why the Institute was spending money on art but Pandit Nehru stood up and defended it — saying art and science are very close to each other.......................I have always maintained that without culture, there is no identity of any nation. It is culture which remains."

As told by MF Husain to Dr Roopen Arya, for the Chetana 60th Anniversary Commemorative Volume (2006) Source Link