Drella looking through America’s portrait

Friends called him Drella. He would have remained Andrii Varhola unless his parents immigrated to America. The whole world knows him as Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol is especially interesting because what he did is not art of original works, but their copies, but the author’s environment rather than the author’s text. It could be said even that his main work was his biography, if one considers the biography, “curriculum vitae,” as a person being a reflective part of the society.

To reflect means to mirror. Warhol is a phenomenon of an author who refuses from authorship, turning instead into a mirror, which reflects the so-called second nature (in spite of the first nature, our reality), the nature of mass culture, advertisement, photography, and TV broadcasting. He makes a very successful play with the image of an artist as a prophet of undisputable truth, carrier of supreme values, the master of “style” and “originality,” absolutely refuting this myth. However, namely because his creative work is a whole plain of reflecting reflections and copying the copies, without a tiny crack, Warhol seems an absolutely impenetrable, hermetic, and mysterious artist. We can say that these simulations shape his essence, but always a bit of doubt remains: does not this bright mirror have a reverse side? In other words, some irritating emptiness, which is doomed to be unfilled and undetermined, remains under this mirror surface.

That is why the documents from Warhol’s life are no less interesting than his works. However, the exhibit “Pop art and its kings,” which has been launched at Tatiana Myronova’s gallery in Kyiv, attracts one’s attention because for the first time in Europe it shows previously unseen photos of Warhol.

William John Kennedy made these photos in 1963-64 at the famous Factory, the place where Warhol lived and created in New York. Besides the “king,” the photo shows his closest comrade-in-arms in those years Robert Indiana and pop-art model Ultra Violet.

The artists, who were scarcely known at the time, are posing next to their works: Warhol is with Marilyn Monroe’s portrait, Indiana – with famous word LOVE: a square-shaped sculpture consisting of four letters which later became one of the symbols of the 1960s. Violet, wearing only a big polka-dot tie is playing with this unbecoming adornment.

Warhol, wearing a short hair-cut, shorter than was common in those years, and big sunglasses, resembles a rock star of the previous decade, a rejuvenated intellectual Elvis Presley. He is always serious, either holding his own work or a photo of cruel breaking up of the anti-racist rally in the US south, or cutting a film, or making a photo session, or talking on the phone. Involved in various activities he is doing everything he was doing during his life in these photos, the circle closes and we again are gliding on the glimmering surface together with him, looking at Warhol who pretends to be Warhol.

However in the very corner of the gallery there is the most interesting photo: Andy Warhol Watching Through American Man: it consists of several rows of identical photos depicting a middle-aged gentleman in glasses, an average American, but in one place the re-gularity is broken: we see Warhol’s face with the same turn of the head, wearing large glasses. This is a joke, yet a deep one.

All these coca-cola and conserved soup tins, stamped Monroe and Mao faces were actually his look. Drella peeps through the portrait of easy-going advertisement America at America. Warhol is close to us not because of the diversity of colors in his works or his silk paintings, which could remind us of Ukrainian folklore art: it’s just that Drella’s America is present everywhere, it is a reflection of our present-day reality, no matter the location. Drella is looking through our portrait at us.