Andy Warhol: Portrait Of The 70s

Andy Warhol, Portraits of the 70s, signed six times, from the estate of Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman, late of Minneapolis, selling at Freeman’s in Chicago It hit me: David Whitney’s Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the 70s is a foundational text for a clearer, bleaker postwar art history. Bleaker than the one Robert Rosenblum thought he was writing when he compared the “upper-income virtuosity” of rainbow sherbet brushstrokes’ to the “lower-income austerity” of Brillo boxes and Most Wanted Men: With Warhol’s gallery of contemporary faces, the decade of the 1970s high society is instantly captured. In this glittering realm, light and shadow are bleached out by the high wattage of spotlights; colors seem selected from the science-fiction rainbow invented by the likes of Baskin-Robbins, and brushstrokes offer an extravagant, upper-income virtuosity which appears to be quoting, for conspicuous consumption, a bravura tradition that extends from Hals through de Kooning. By comparison, the look…