It hit me: David Whitney’s Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the 70s is a foundational text for a clearer, bleaker postwar art history. Bleaker than the one Robert Rosenblum thought he was writing when he compared the “upper-income virtuosity” of rainbow sherbet brushstrokes’ to the “lower-income austerity” of Brillo boxes and Most Wanted Men:
With Warhol’s gallery of contemporary faces, the decade of the 1970s high society is instantly captured. In this glittering realm, light and shadow are bleached out by the high wattage of spotlights; colors seem selected from the science-fiction rainbow invented by the likes of Baskin-Robbins, and brushstrokes offer an extravagant, upper-income virtuosity which appears to be quoting, for conspicuous consumption, a bravura tradition that extends from Hals through de Kooning. By comparison, the look of Warhol’s 1960s paintings was often of lower-income austerity and dreariness, of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, of the faces of criminals, innocent victims, or remote superstars who could barely sparkle through the smeared newsprint. On more than one level, Warhol has wrapped up two decades for our social time capsule.
But that wasn’t the moment. It was 84 lots into the auction of her Chanel sweatshirts and It Bags where Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman’s personalized copy of the Whitney catalogue appears. Warhol signed it on five different pages and the cover. I wondered why.
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