What's an Andy Warhol?

Richard Dorment, in The New York Review of Books, reviews several new books on Andy Warhol, and explains why Warhol wasn't just an artist, but, in Arthur Danto's words, "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the world of art has produced."

In his entertaining memoir Younger Brother, Younger Son (1997), Colin Clark, a son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, recounts a story from his time working as a production assistant on the film The Prince and the Showgirl. To explain why Marilyn Monroe came across far more vividly on screen than her classically trained costar Laurence Olivier, Clark observed that, in front of the cameras, she knew how to speak a language an actor trained for the stage simply could not understand. To Olivier's fury and frustration, the less the Hollywood goddess appeared to act, the more she lit up the screen. "Some years later," Clark continues,
I experienced a similar situation when I took my father to the studio of the Pop artist Andy Warhol in New York. My father was an art historian of the old school, used to the canvasses of Rembrandt and Titian. He simply could not conceive that Andy's silk-screened Brillo boxes were serious art.
Just as Monroe understood that you don't have to act for the camera in the way the stage-trained Olivier defined acting, so Warhol realized that you don't need to make art for an audience brought up on film and television in the way Kenneth Clark defined art. Actress and artist grasped that in the modern world, presentation counts for more than substance. The less you do, the greater may be the impact.

What defeated Kenneth Clark about Warhol's paintings was not only their banal subject matter but also the means he used to make them. Before it is anything else, Warhol's portrait of Marilyn Monroe is a silk screen, a simple reproductive technique in which the artist or craftsman stencils a design onto an acetate plate and then fits the plate into a meshed screen.