Over the past three decades, the marriage of high art and finance has steadily enriched the latter while acutely impoverishing the former. The business artists of today, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Shepard Fairy, known more for their public personae and brand identity than the quality of any single work, would be unimaginable without the template provided by the pioneering artist-cum-entrepreneur: Andy Warhol. This month, Warhol’s work is the subject of a focus exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum in celebration of collector Douglas Cramer.

Left: Andy Warhol, Portrait of Doug Cramer (1985), acrylic and silksceen ink on linen. Collection Cincinnati Art Museum fine arts magazine

A television producer whose credits include The Brady Bunch, Mission: Impossible, The Love Boat, and a productive partnership with Aaron Spelling, this Cincinnati native is one of the nation’s foremost collectors of contemporary art. Cramer is routinely ranked by ARTnews as one of the top 200 collectors worldwide and his generosity has earned him the 2011 Cincinnati Art Award. Commemorating this moment, the current exhibition includes 32 pieces by Warhol, all portraits of Cramer made between 1984 and 1985.

Of the 32, eight of these portraits are Polaroid photographs of Cramer taken by Warhol to be used as the foundation for his trademark silkscreened works. As one might expect with an instant photo, these pictures are by no means subtle. Lacking delicacy, these high contrast images create a type of readymade, a model for Warhol to project and trace on to sheets of paper, because as he said “tracing is the best kind of drawing”.

The eight drawings of Cramer on view–descendants of the original photos- are for the most part, flat and lifeless. Though the didactic panel indicates that the works are a combination of traced projection and hand embellishment, the lack of variation and line sensitivity suggests otherwise. And two groups of three drawings are simply repetitions of the same two images. The hub of the exhibition, two sets of silkscreen and acrylic portraits fare only slightly better.

The first set features a black high contrast image of Cramer printed on four canvases, two with silver acrylic backgrounds and two with gold. Upon receipt of these Cramer was unsatisfied with the results and asked Warhol for something more colorful. Always eager to satisfy a customer, Warhol acquiesced. The results of Cramer’s request were four significantly more colorful, but marginally better paintings. Like all of the pieces in the show, these reworked paintings have nothing peculiar about them. Though the intense, saturated color –which immediately reads as being in vogue in the 1980’s- are the highlight of the show, these paintings present a rote repetition of the same image and are indistinguishable from Warhol’s other celebrity portraits of the era.

Much is made of Warhol’s allegedly ground breaking use of multiples, a comment that, in 1962, may have carried some weight. But by the time of these works -1985- the repetition comes off as soulless, as mechanical and cheap as anything made in China. Initially, Warhol discerned something unseemly about American life; a sinister undercurrent just below the surface of postwar prosperity. This keen observations gave his early works an edge and a vitality that all but disappeared by the late 1960s. By 1985 Warhol became what his seminal works exposed: an empty commodity seeking new markets.

By Alan Pocaro, Contributing Writer

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