Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol had long engaged with the camouflage design and pattern before, in 1986, concentrating exclusively on its depiction in, often, mammoth compositions that in their scale transformed themselves from paintings to environments. As Philip Armstrong notes, the Camouflage series was itself the final part of a larger series of paintings produced within the last ten years of the artist’s life, all of them “abstract” in appearance and all of them situated quite strategically in terms of prior history of abstract or “modernist” painting.” (Philip Armstrong, “In the Image of Painting” in Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Art & Patrimoine, Plus près que vous ne le croyiez, 1998, n. p.). Other abstract works included the infamous, scatological Oxidation paintings (Warhol’s wry commentary on the phallocentricism of the Abstract Expressionists, especially that of Jack ‘The Dripper’ Pollock); his architectonic descriptions of mere nothingness found in his Shadow paintings; the baroque splendor of his large Rorschach works, as well as lesser-known series of Egg Paintings and Yarn Paintings.

The Camouflage series, unlike the other "abstractions" mentioned above, is not technically an abstraction in the same way an Oxidation painting is. Chance plays a crucial role in the compositional development of an Oxidation. The design of a Camouflage was predetermined, just as the "design" of a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor or a picture of an Electric Chair was. The artist based his paintings on standard designs employed by the United States Army. As David Bourdon notes, “[Warhol] modeled his four-color pattern upon a swatch of camouflage netting purchased at an army and navy store on Fifth Avenue, tracing the interlocking shapes and ordering three silkscreens. He did not need a fourth silkscreen because he gave the canvas an allover coat of the lightest color, printing the other three, darker colors over it.” (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 400). It is Warhol’s desire to eschew altogether any readable image, which he often manipulated with layers of this camouflage design in various colors, and to focus on the singular presentation of the design that connects it to this eclectic cluster of abstract voices.

The first time we encounter the camouflage design is in Warhol’s images of Josef Beuys (the 1986 camouflaged versions take the same portraits made in 1980, but add a layer of camouflage that result in an unusually poignant tribute), the Statue of Liberty, the Last Supper and, of course, his own "Fright Wig" self-portraits. Armstrong notes that the design itself functioned in much the same way as a signature – a sign associated with his own extremely well-known name and a building block of his artistic legacy. By eradicating any source other than the design itself, Warhol still maintains the associative tenor of the design with himself and his achievements. One immediately knows that the present work is a Warhol, much in the same way we know a silkscreened image of Marilyn Monroe has to be by Andy Warhol. When used in combination with figurative imagery, particularly portraits, the camouflage pattern engenders a highly graphic and energetic structural element, serving to compliment and contradict the photographic information silkscreened on the canvas that it superimposes.

Warhol’s singular employment of the camouflage design to create monumental canvases illuminates a series of questions regarding the status of the abstract painting as well as the legacy of Pop Art. In a sense, this important late series of works sees Warhol find a nexus between the very specific, process-oriented vocabulary of Pop Art, where the Sign reigns supreme, with the Signifier-privileged Abstract canon – a more romantic, fluid form of ‘expression’. These late Camouflages, particularly when monumental in size such as the present work, display a highly effective economy of means, lucidity of meaning and, above all else, point to Warhol’s humor. Simply as formal, expressive color articulations, these paintings work as purely abstract fields. However, in their synthetic construction, together with the pool of meanings associated with the concept of camouflaging, the works take on a different status. In so doing, Warhol’s series of Camouflage paintings can be seen as truly post-modern paintings; their negotiation of previous Modernist examples allows the artist to fully articulate the means of securing and sustaining painting’s critical possibilities in relation to its Modernist past, but always with a contemporary eye for the future.