Andy Warhol has become almost as much of a household name as the products, such as Coca Cola bottles, or people, Marilyn Monroe, for example, he depicted in his paintings and prints. Since his first painting of Campbell's soup cans in 1962 until his death in 1987, he was frequently in the public eye.

Warhol was part of the Pop Art movement, so named because the artist portrayed objects from popular culture and everyday life. (Other Pop artists include Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg.) Pop Art should be seen in the context of the social changes of the 1960s. The "conspicuous consumption" of mass produced objects in the American society was the object of much scrutiny. While the hippie culture rejected such a society and tried to form an alternate lifestyle, Pop artists embraced consumerism and drew inspiration from it. If products like Coke, soup and Brillo pads were so important to the American public in their daily lives, why shouldn't they be the subject of art as well, these artists asked.

Warhol's style was at first as controversial as his subject matter. Early in his career Warhol began to use screenprinting as his primary medium. In screenprinting (or silk screening, as it is also called) colored paint or ink is forced through a fine screen, on which non-printing areas are blocked out, onto a surface below. Warhol used a photographic silk screen process where a photo is transferred to a film from which a stencil is made and this stencil is used to block out areas on the screen. Because screenprinting was used to create advertisements, product labels and packaging, Warhol felt its bland, commercial qualities exactly suited his product-oriented subject matter. Warhol liked to say that he wanted to be a machine and strictly reproduce his mass media subjects; indeed he called his studio a factory. Yet when he used screenprints, he often put on color off register, hand painted swaths of color or added decorative line to his silk-screened photographic image. It seems that despite his stated intentions, Warhol was impelled to put his own painterly mark on this mechanical process.

The Hunter Museum has several works, two prints and a painting, by Warhol in its collection. All focus on political figures. With his paintings and prints of Marilyn Monroe in 1964, Warhol began to create portraits of celebrities who had become icons of our society. Figures in entertainment, politics and sports, for example, are all in their own way a product of our consumer society, packaged and sold just as commercial products are.

The three Hunter works focus on Jimmy Carter and his mother, Lillian Carter. Rather than using news or publicity photographs as he had early in his career, by 1975 Warhol was taking his own photographs to be used for the portraits. Frank Fowler, who gave all three of these works to the museum, recalls that he drove Warhol to the railway station in Plains, Georgia, where he photographed Miss Lillian and President Carter. Warhol often used a flash to bleach out any detail on the sitter's faces, and that seems to be the case in these works.

In Lillian Carter (a print published to raise funds for the Carter presidential campaign) her photograph was screenprinted onto paper and then major features of her face and clothing were emphasized with wiry, zig-zag lines. Areas of saturated color purple, yellow and turquoise, for example, overlay her image and create a decorative, almost Cubist, effect on the print.

In Jimmy Carter (done as part of the Inaugural portfolio to commemorate the Inaugural Celebration) is rather unusual for Warhol's prints, for there is no evidence of a photograph. Rather, the same wiry lines which appear in Lillian Carter alone create the smiling image of the president. The work is most likely based on a photograph, for there is a print which uses a photograph of Carter in an identical pose.

The painting of Jimmy Carter shows how Warhol translated his screenprinting technique to paintings. A black screenprint of a photograph is printed on the canvas and rather than using blocks of color as in Lillian Carter, Warhol adds color with acrylic paint brushed freely on the canvas. Warhol applied the paint rather thickly in areas and ignored the boundaries of the image as when the red brown paint goes beyond the contours of the hair. This painting and the print of Miss Lillian reveal how the mass produced quality of the photograph and silkscreen process are contradicted by the painterly application of color.

-- Ellen Simak