Doing what it says on the tin

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.

Much the same thing has been said by many artists and writers, but seldom has this proposition been so tested as it is by ‘32 Campbell’s Soup Cans’.

In the Factory, as he called his atelier, Warhol made paintings of photographs, casually silk-screened prints of blown-up acetates of blow-ups from contact sheets of original negatives, copies of copies, images of images. He inverted high and low culture. He expressed something, defined something, about our psychic relationship to the stuff that surrounds us, in the way that Freud or Proust did. He changed the way we see, and he changed art.

And despite its spectacular inscrutability, in his early and best work there is ample evidence of personality: the sweet and funny side, in the ‘Marilyns’ and ‘Elvises’, and the cool and cruel side, in ‘Electric Chair’ and ‘Burning Car’.