We interviewed American curator Donna de Salvo - then at Tate Modern - for this piece on the Andy Warhol exhibition at the gallery in 2002.

Andy Warhol: 'the Picasso of our Generation'

When Andy Warhol made his prediction in 1968 that 'in the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes', he could hardly have seen that in 2002 his own fifteen minutes would still be being played out to an ever-demanding public. His iconic images of Marilyn, Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell’s soup are seen and recognised the world over. Now, a major Warhol retrospective at London’s Tate Modern gives new insight into one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists.

Donna de Salvo, curator of the exhibition and a leading Warhol expert, talks about Warhol and her vision for the exhibition.

'In my opinion, Warhol essentially invents painting post-1950. He opened the door for some painters and closed the door for others. His impact on other artists has been extraordinary. Not only did he introduce certain ideas about media, he also gave artists permission to function in many realms.' Without Warhol, says Ms De Salvo, 'it’s almost inconceivable to think of the generations that have followed, whether it's a Jeff Koons or a Cindy Sherman or a Damien Hirst.'

What Ms De Salvo wants is to give visitors to the Tate the opportunity to look beyond the image that is Warhol and truly consider his paintings. 'When you think of someone like Donald Judd or even someone like Mondrian, you can think of the very basic tools they were engaged with and were capable of reusing over and over again, each time making a new work. We find that sometimes hard to apply when thinking about Warhol and that's what we demonstrate in this exhibition by really focusing on them as the great paintings and great innovations they are.'

So, while many of the works on show will have been seen many times over in various reproductions, she has no doubts about the impact the actual paintings will have on visitors.

'The name Andy Warhol conjures up numerous images but you need the experience of standing in front of the actual paintings to see the physical nuances. You see the way Warhol really used the silk screen as a brush. He used the printing processes as one would use a pencil.

'On a practical level, how the works are installed also dictates how they are seen. Often Warhol's paintings are installed with very little room around them, they're almost lined up.

Because there's such an emphasis put on the images themselves we tend not to see them as paintings. You need to get people to really focus on them not simply as an image of, say, a Coca-Cola bottle but as a painting that uses the image but also uses many other things to create in one instance a vibrating field of Coca-Cola bottles. It's the direct experience that matters most.'

An exhibition of this type and magnitude can take years to organise. First the works that are wanted have to be identified, then they have to be tracked down and secured on loan.

Because the Warhol retrospective originated in Berlin, the real challenge came when the paintings arrived at Tate Modern.

'You move from the abstract to the real and this is the best part of being a curator, conceptualising the installation. No matter how much you work it out on paper, you never know until you get those works in the gallery how it's really going to look. It's really about constructing a narrative while allowing each work to have the best space possible.'

While Ms De Salvo is keen to honour the vision of the originating curator, Heiner Bastian, the exhibition at Tate Modern shows Warhol 'in a more hybrid sense'.

'We show the paintings but we also show his photography and his films all in the context of the gallery. So that you can see how Warhol blurs the boundaries by challenging our ideas of what constitutes a print, what constitutes a drawing, what constitutes painting.'

The work is also grouped on themes, such as the images Warhol derived from newspaper photographs of car crashes, and there are several galleries that look at the evolution of Warhol's technique, 'from his use of the blotted line in college, through the printed line that he used very early in his career as a commercial artist in 1950s New York, and on to making paintings using rubber stamps to create not just fields of colour but fields made up of dollar bills and Coca-Cola bottles'.

'In a sense the exhibition presents a very formal analysis of Warhol's work. We move from the 1950s almost to the end of his career punctuating the journey with galleries devoted to a single theme: a film, a gallery of drawings, or a recreation of the installation he did at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966 when he bid farewell to painting to concentrate on film and he filled one room with cow wallpaper and another with silver pillows.'

The exhibition also, unlike Berlin, includes 'an expanded section of the work he produced in the 70s and 80s in a series called Shadows that is based on a photograph of a shadow which is then applied many times in different colours, sometimes with diamond dust - images that are very poetic and less well-known in the UK'.

'I think that Warhol in many ways, especially to a younger generation, is seen as our Picasso. Warhol’s understanding of media, both its aesthetic possibilities and its mass cultural implications, make him an artist who is very much about the latter part of the 20th century,' says Ms De Salvo. 'He’s now almost like an old master. He's an historical figure and yet his art is incredibly fresh and contemporary.

'The great thing about art is that it is an incredible experience on so many levels - a private experience between you and the work of art, a public experience between you and other individuals. There's a shared enthusiasm, a debate that takes place, it's really a starting point for social interaction. Maybe Warhol lends himself to that better than any other artist because he was a social observer and he was able to really see the nuances of that kind of interaction.'



Fetherstonhaugh is a multi-disciplinary consultancy, working in the Arts, Higher Education and Finance. For more information on who we are and what we do, please explore the rest of the site or contact us on (0)20 7580 7227 or info@fetherstonhaugh.com.