![]() The issue, I think, instead has something to do with gender. But Marilyn, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor weren’t exactly homely before Warhol did his great silkscreen number on their photographs in the 1960s. In the show, the luxe 300 SL, a remarkable streamlined 1954 Formula One Grand Prix car and a low-slung fiberglass 1970 experimental model, also with up-swooping gullwing doors, are surely among the 20th century’s most aesthetically pleasing cars. The problem with the Mercedes commission is not that the cars started out with beauty already on their side, so that the paintings had nothing much to do. Drag could transform a bland black-and-white photo into a glamorous painting. The difference between the photograph and the painting was like the difference between plain old boy-next-door James Slattery and exquisite Candy Darling, to name Slattery’s transformation into the most beautiful cinematic superstar working in Warhol’s Factory. Acrylic colors are like makeup - the foundation and lipstick, the mascara and rouge, the wig and jewels. The photograph is the equivalent of a fresh and untouched face - a given. How does an ordinary photo turn into a painting? Warhol’s answer: By making paintings that are photographs in drag. ![]() ![]() The six-part Ryan Murphy Netflix series doesn’t tackle Andy Warhol’s revolutionary 1960s work, but rather the relationships that were meaningful to him. If given a choice between the car and a painting, I’d take the car in a heartbeat.Įntertainment & Arts Review: Netflix’s ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ is a love story, not an art story - and that’s why it works Hanging adjacent are Warhol’s perfectly pretty, decidedly snoozy portraits of it. End of deep comprehension.īut I also know this: There’s a drop-dead gorgeous 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing coupe, a silver model with a royal blue leather interior and matching leather suitcase strapped into the rear deck, where it can be covetously ogled through the back window. I know only one thing about them for certain, and that is that my engineer grandfather designed a magneto for the Ford Model A, which replaced the hugely successful Model T in 1928. The vehicles, on the other hand, range from fascinating to extraordinary.Īnd I say that knowing that cars are not my area of expertise. As with much of what Warhol painted in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the nearly faultless run of superlative, art-history-changing works he produced between about 19, the Mercedes paintings are banal. (The show was co-organized by the Petersen and Mercedes-Benz curator Renate Wiehager.) The art is paired with five of the eight models of vehicle depicted in the paintings. Twenty-seven of the 36 completed silkscreen paintings (80 were planned) and all 13 pencil drawings are currently on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, where “Andy Warhol: Cars - Works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection” has just opened in the first-floor gallery.
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