Andy Warhol, if he had lived, would not yet be 70 though already, his career seems well back in time. His death in a New York hospital, 10 years and some months ago, almost certainly was due to negligence or mismanagement after a fairly routine gall-bladder operation. He died when his reputation appeared to be entering a trough, from which it has not entirely recovered; today, few critics seem to be in agreement about him or his ultimate importance. The public, however, has never lost interest and Warhol books and postcards sell by the million.
Warhol personified Pop Culture and he understood from the start the age of mass communications he was born into, its mixture of cynicism and gullibility, its short attention-span, its need of media heroes and heroines, its materialism, its consumerism and its sentimentality. He himself seems to have shared all or most of these traits, and he created, or projected, a persona which was as instantly recognisable as Mickey Mouse or Lil Abner. The grotesque silver wig, the sickly, deadpan face, the monosyllabic utterances and one-liners, the laid-back style, were virtually patented and put on show. His outward personality became as much public property as the facade of the Empire State Building. The more people heard his name the more he liked it, and in his art too he hammered home the value of repetition. Selecting certain simple, basic motifs - a soup can, the dollar sign, the head of Marilyn Monroe as it might loom out from a poster seen from a passing car or trolleybus, his own face - he used them over and over, as a pop musician might standardise his beat. Warhol Style triumphed worldwide while he was still a relatively young man, penetrating into many fields including the layout of record sleeves, house decor, fabric designs, cartoons and commercial art, even clothes. It is doubtful if any other artist in history has such a massive public impact, and to a great extent Warhol can be said to have shaped the taste of a whole epoch. He may have been lucky in being, from the start, in tune with its values, but there is no denying that he also stamped himself indelibly upon it.
Apart from his art, he controlled a kind of cultural empire which embraced music (he launched his own band, Velvet Underground), films, journalism (he started and ran his own magazine, Interview), television, photography, commercial portraiture, advertising. The famous Factory, on East 47th Street in New York, became not only his workshop but the home-from-home of the oddly mixed crew of followers, helpers, hangers-on and drop-outs who gathered around him: Baby Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Brigid Polk, Ultra Violet, Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar, Ronnie Cutrone and many more.
Warhol ruled over these people with manipulative skill, and sometimes took a detached, voyeuristic pleasure in observing their feuds and ambitions and their erotic lives - and also, in some cases, their drug addiction. Yet arguably, some of them exploited him more than he exploited them and several were launched into successful careers by the start he gave them.
Few people have been more written about or analysed in recent decades; since his death there has been a thriving Warhol industry, both biographically and in the memoirs or impressions of people who were close to him. Yet the man remains enigmatic, as presumably he was meant to be. The testimony of both his friends and his enemies is often contradictory and perhaps the only reasonable conclusion is that he must have been several different personalities under one skin. Many or even most people saw only a single aspect of him, which they took for the whole man while the other sides of him remained in shadow. Warhol was a complex character, in whom extremes and contrasts met, including genuine naivete and deep sophistication.
The curator and art historian Henry Geldzahler, who was as close to him as anybody except his peasant mother, has said: "There were at least three Andy Warhols, and confusing them has led to apparently contrary evaluations of his achievement. Each aspect of his public persona deserves attention." He listed the three in due order: "First, Andrew Warhola, who conversed with his mother in a kind of pidgin Czech-English, and who attended church with her, often several times a week." The second was "the international spokesman for a Pop response to a world dominated by new technologies". And finally, "the third aspect was, quite simply, Andy Warhol the artist: a painter who was able to hold multiple and contradictory meanings in balance."
Growing up as the son of Czech immigrants in an outlying lower-middle-class area of industrial Pittsburgh, Warhol as a boy knew poor health (St Vitus's Dance) and the aftermath of the War and Depression years. He was a gifted art student who won prizes before moving to New York at 20, as a naive, unsure but ambitious young man who went about with a portfolio under his arm, touting for work as a commercial artist. His talent as a draughtsman and designer soon opened doors for him, as well as the special chic he gave to all he did, and in his years of commercial art Warhol worked for Vogue, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar and other glamorous publications. The "shoe" drawings he did for an article in Life magazine in 1957 are now familiar to millions of people through reproductions.
One thing nobody has ever denied him, and that is complete and dedicated professionalism. Whatever technique he turned to he studied closely and mastered, whether it was book illustration or fashion drawings, lithography or drawing on gold paper. As a "serious" artist, however, he was slow to emerge and unsure of his direction - or as a friend put it, "unfocused". Abstract Expressionism was well past its peak, but Pop Art had not yet fully taken shape; so when Warhol in 1961 first saw Roy Lichtenstein's paintings based on comic strips, he was shaken since he himself had just begun to do something similar. Instead, he turned to Campbell's soup tins, dollar signs, heads of Marilyn Monroe and cut-outs of Elvis Presley. These, and the familiar Coca Cola bottles, are the works that first made him famous.
The prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery took him on, and the media increasingly took him up as Warhol became "news". Using a technique which mixed silkscreen ink with polymer paint, he produced multi-image works based on news photos of car crashes, the electric chair, race riots and even a gangster funeral - exploitative subject matter, no doubt, but emotionally distanced by Warhol's "cool" aesthetic and his use of repetitive imagery which often registers as a kind of optical blur. Warhol's use of repetition, in fact, is one of the sources of his originality. It had become a commonplace in modern music, and in modern prose since Gertrude Stein, but few had tried its effect in painting.
However, film-making and running the Factory began to absorb more and more of his time and energies, though in the 1970s, there was another run of pictorial energy. He became a fashionable portraitist, using a technique which mixed photography with paint, and the people he portrayed included David Hockney, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Man Ray, Joseph Beuys, and a whole gallery of society figures. The outsize heads of Chairman Mao are well known, but less familiar are the series of skulls which he painted relatively late in his career. These are, however, among his most powerful works, though they do not fit easily into the public perception of him as the personification of Pop - many or even most people still view Warhol from the angle or image created by his early pictures. After all, Warhol had diced with death; in 1968 an unbalanced feminist named Valerie Solanis entered the Factory and fired several revolver bullets into him and a critic named Mario Amaya. The artist barely survived emergency surgery and was hospitalised for nearly two months.
In his last decade of life he was an international celebrity, continually jet-setting to countries near or distant, including Iran under the last Shah. This last visit, largely arranged by the Shah's sister who acted as a kind of royal public-relations agent abroad for the regime, caused anger or irritation among the left, and when the jetliner carrying Warhol and his entourage from New York to Tehran, touched down en route in London, he was besieged by journalists who questioned him about the validity of his visit. How, one of them wanted to know, could he go to a right-wing, repressive country like Iran? Warhol's reply was typically terse: "By plane."
As the money rolled in, Warhol became a compulsive shopper and collector, haunting the junk markets of New York, often going out in the morning and returning hours later laden with parcels and boxes, buying everything from expensive jewellery to hundreds of commonplace cookie jars. Perhaps this was to some extent an emotional substitute, since his (mostly homosexual) love affairs brought him little fulfilment and he was always haunted by a sense of his own physical ugliness and oddity. His house became increasingly crowded with this mixture of junk and objets d'art, so that some of the upper rooms could not be used, or even entered. When most of this was sold off after Warhol's death, the auction lasted some days and the publicity was worldwide.
As a painter he was imitated all around the world, but surprisingly, the country which probably reacted most positively to his work was Germany. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne bought him in quantity, from quite early in his career, and the impact of his style on a whole generation - or even two generations - of German artists is easy to see and hard to avoid. Perhaps for Germans, still emerging from the war years and an orgy of nationalism, his deracine, cosmopolitan, big-city style represented a new dream image or identity which could blot out the recent past.
The immense fame and self-propagation have had a negative side; for many, Warhol represents most of what has been wrong with art since the 1960s. He was shamelessly exploitative, he used methods of mass production, he was both a showman and a voyeur, a social climber and an empire-builder, allegedly pandering to a world of blatant commercialism and media hype. His odd, even enigmatic personality has repelled at least as many people as it has attracted or fascinated. Some critics view him as an intellectual moron, scheming, amoral and uncultured, the product of an era largely dominated by drugs, sex, and money - and, of course, social snobbery. The litany of hostility is a long one, and one which seems likely to continue, since so much of what Warhol did or said gives hostages to his detractors.
To begin with, Warhol certainly shared the public's simplistic awe of fame and glamour - all his life he loved meeting celebrities, and he virtually collected film stars, especially if they were women older than himself. The son of poor emigrants, he worshipped High Life and the Jet Set even if he found the reality rather disillusioning; he loved money and social success, though neither seems to have brought him any great degree of contentment. His sexual oddity, his voyeurism (he sometimes recorded the copulation of friends on a movie camera), his calculating careerism are all plain enough to see, but ultimately they do not seem very relevant to his career as an artist. Perhaps it is time to forget about the man - or rather the media image of him - and look again at the work. Those who knew Warhol before he developed his laid-back, semi-articulate persona agree that he was in fact highly intelligent and sophisticated. He looked at more art, ancient and modern, than he liked to admit and from the start he was a greatly gifted draughtsman, while later he developed into a brilliant and original colourist. In spite of the snubs administered to him by Willem de Kooning, Rothko and other elder painters, he sincerely admired them and their work and never went back on that admiration. Yet the hostile reactions to his own early work seem to have depressed him, which perhaps explains his long dalliance with film-making. It was only to close friends that he sometimes confessed his inner hurts and discouragement.
Warhol used techniques which lent themselves to mass reproduction because both the spirit and the technology of his epoch encouraged it. He did not lower his standards technically by doing so - in fact, he was a considerable innovator for most of his career, as well as a compulsive worker. Warhol's public image blotted out the long, solitary hours he spent on his painting, sometimes working late into the night in the Factory when everybody else had gone home except the night watchman.
He simplified his later style to what may seem poster level, but it is an artful, daring simplicity and his sense of placing is always sure though often unorthodox. His subtlety as a colourist has consistently been underrated, though it is at least admitted that he brought into painting all sorts of subject matter which had been considered outside the pale. Above all, he broke down the barrier between "high art" and commercial art, allowing each to fertilise the other. Or as one critic put it, he showed that there was as much innate culture in a Coca Cola can as in a bottle of wine.
Pop Art has been and gone, and though it produced many talented figures it produced very few major ones. Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, Wesselmans, Indiana already seem very much artists of their time, lacking just that extra dimension to raise them above the brash Manhattan chic which was the main ethos behind Pop, whereas Warhol created images which remain magnetic and powerful, showing how much he owed to abstract painting but also to the Pop imagery of urban living. His paintings of Marilyn Monroe, in particular, have an iconic quality which recalls the icons of the Virgin which his ancestors worshipped, as well as giving off a strange, almost voyeur's sense of physical corruption and decay. Warhol may have worshipped the external glamour and brilliance of his milieu - New York at its peak as a world capital - but he could also smell the mortality that lay behind the mask of gold.
Andy Warhol: After The Party - Works 1956-1986, comprises 100 works from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, including 1950s drawings, iconic work from the 1960s and 1970s, Cow Wallpaper, Cloud Pillows and disaster paint- ings. The exhibition is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from next Thursday, November 20th, 1997 to March 22nd, 1998.