HUM 101 – Warhol Essay

ASSIGNMENT DIRECTIONSThis exam is designed for you to express and defend your position on the following works of art. Answer all of the questions in your own words, by using lecture notes and the textbook to support your responses. Use complete sentences, use proper grammar, and don’t forget to proofread and spell check your work before submitting it.

All assignments must be typed, cover page, double-space, 2 – 3 pages Font: 12 points Arial or New Times Roman (NO FANCY FONTS) DO NOT use the following sources in your responses: Wikipedia, encyclopedia, or

dictionary If you use Henry Sayre World of Art or an online source in your response, use MLA and add a

work cite page. Do not PLAGIARIZE and turn in your assignment in on time!

Andy Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot explores the era of civil unrest in America. He documents the Civil Rights experience in a four panel work, which displays the violent treatment of African Americans in the south in the 1960s.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS (Answer all questions.)

1. Why should you study the world of art?2. What can you learn by observing art?3. What does art tell you about history and culture?4. Name one (1) traditional role of an artist that can be applied to evaluate this piece.

Explain why. 5. How does the use of the colors red, white, and blue contribute to the work? Why did

Warhol use them?6. What is the psychological impact of the work?

SOURCE 1: Sayre’s Article

SOURCE 2 Internet Article ( http://warholessays.tumblr.com/post/113779798725/race-riot-1964 )

Race Riot, 1964 – Andy Warhol Andy Warhol descended his pop art perch just once to comment visually on racial tensions rampant in the United States during the mid-20th century. Abandoning the fatuous charms of Hollywood celebrities and prosaic images of American consumerism, Warhol plunged head first – if only briefly – into the treacherous waters of the American Civil Rights Movement at its crest to create Race Riot, an acrylic and silkscreen painting on four linen panels that he executed in 1964, the same year US President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Although the painting fits chronologically within the milieu that comprised Warhol’s Death and Disaster Series, its subject matter is far more political than the pictures of car crashes, electric chairs, suicides, gangster funerals, and bizarre self-portraits that were the more usual stuff of this Warhol sub genre. Different, too, was the artist’s choice of a source. The genesis of Race Riot was a photograph by Charles Moore that Warhol appropriated from the pages of Life magazine (May 17, 1963) without permission from the photographer. Moore later brought suit against the artist for his bold copyright infringement, and the case was settled out of court along with two others of a similar nature. Charles Moore shot the photo that Warhol used as the basis for Race Riot in Birmingham, Alabama, during the violent spring of 1963. The city, long a nexus for segregation politics and practice, evolved as the center of a growing Civil Rights Movement seeking integration and equal treatment for black citizens. History remembers the time and place with such epithets as the Birmingham Campaign, Bloody Sunday, and the Children’s Crusade. Photos, including Moore’s, delivered a far more graphic and compelling account to a horrified nation of Life magazine readers, including Andy Warhol. The photo shows a police dog straining at a leash held by two police officers, intent on sinking his teeth into the buttocks of a black man who appears to be trying to escape as a semicircle of peaceful protesters looks the other way. Keeping with his own tradition of both multiple and repeated images, Warhol used the photo to silkscreen a series of ten iterations. The red, white, and blue Race Riot, largest of the lot, measuring 60” x 66” (152.4 cm x 167.6 cm), and its only multicolored piece, along with Mustard Race Riot, Pink Race Riot, and six others dubbed “little Race Riots" by the artist debuted in a show called Death in America at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1964. The show also included images of electric chairs, car wrecks, and suicides. The visual suggestion of an American flag that overlays the red, white, and blue Race Riot may have alluded to the iconic flag paintings of fellow pop artist Jasper Johns. Andy Warhol discovered Johns in the ‘60s on one of his many personal tours of New York galleries; and although Warhol loved the flags, he couldn’t afford them at the time. Francesco Bonami, an Italian art curator who has written extensively about Warhol, presents a double-sided view of Race Riot in an essay titled “How Warhol Did Not Murder Painting but Masterminded the Killing of Content.” Bonami opens by asking whether Warhol is an android, then goes on to detail the artist’s political and moral detachment from his subject matter, pointing out that the artist was a socialite, not a social critic. Having drawn an extensive analogy between Warhol’s seemingly emotionless take on his art and the characters in “Blade Runner” and acknowledges that Warhol “could have been, and probably was, a sort of a fraud," Bonami then rides the critic’s fence into

the sunset, writing in conclusion, "Today we could not accept Warhol’s superficial, apolitical positions, but—yes, there is another but—we are still here, and luckily so are his paintings.” Race Riot, signed and dated “Andy Warhol 64” on the overlap of the upper left panel, comes with a provenance nearly as impressive as its most recent price tag. Former owners include Sam Wagstaff, New York; photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, New York; the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe, New York; Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich; Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Stahel, Zurich; Private Collection, Monaco; and the Gagosian Gallery. One could wonder whether the $62.9 million paid for Race Riot in 2014 was an unconscious mea culpa on the part of very wealthy Americans, the famed 1%? As such, it could represent a Warholian spin on reparation.