"I'm starting pop art," declared Andy Warhol in 1960, never dreaming, perhaps, how ineradicably he would be identified with the style. Popular imagery, much of it taken from advertisements, had been explored as early as 1956 in England by Richard Hamilton in a small collage entitled "Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?" representing a trendy, middle-class living room inhabited by nearly nude figures cut from magazine ads. Advertising, both in the print media and on television, was ubiquitous, and reproducible art was central to the adman's campaign. It was Warhol's affinity for reproducibility that gave him a place in cultural history.
Educated at Carnegie Tech in the 1940s, Andrew Warhola, one of four children of Czechoslovakian immigrants who settled in a working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh, was trained in the European Bauhaus tradition. He arrived in New York in 1949 at the age of twenty-one and was almost immediately employed as a commercial artist. Determined to be acknowledged as a painter, in the early sixties he began experimenting with an unusual technique of portraiture that combined photo silk-screening and painting. He purchased a black-and-white publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe, cropped it, outlined the shape of her head and shoulders on a large canvas, painted the eyelids, lips, and face in garish colors, and then applied the silk-screened photograph slightly off-register.
"Marilyn Monroe (1962)" was a historic success. In later portraits, Warhol added large cubes of color that were complementary to his sitters' faces and outlined certain features with sketchy brush strokes. A certain ambiguity remained, however: is the purpose commemoration or advertisement? Warhol claimed utter indifference, yet he perceived the numbing effect of our overexposure to car crashes, race riots, and electric-chair executions as well as the media's power to deify celebrities.
The "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" was commissioned by dealer Ronald Feldman. Warhol recorded the series in his diary on August 29, 1979: "I haven't been told for sure yet who's in it...think they were considering Bobby Dylan but I read that he turned born-again Christian." In the end, it included French actress Sarah Bernhardt; Gertrude Stein, Golda Meir, the Marx Brothers, Franz Kafka, George Gershwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, and Louis Brandeis. The artist used archival or existing photographs, instantly recognizable but "jazzed up": they are poster-size, big enough to be seen clearly across a gallery. Blocks of hot blue, turquoise, red, pink, orange, yellow, and green underlie their faces; brush strokes dart around eyebrows, lips, and hair.
When the portfolio and the related paintings were exhibited at The Jewish Museum in September 1980, the project was harshly criticized as "vulgar," "tawdry," and exploitative of its Jewish subjects. Yet there is something in the luminous eyes of Franz Kafka under intense blue slashed by lightning-rod yellow, in the handsome profile of George Gershwin squared by hunter green, in the zany movement of the Marx Brothers' triplicate heads, in Sarah Bernhardt's youthful gaze through luscious red and pink that leads one to believe that Warhol was not as uninvolved as he claimed-that he admired his "Ten Jewish Geniuses," as he called them.