Curator’s Voice: Richard Meyer on “Warhol’s Jews” at the Jewish Museum

NEW YORK—In 1980, following the suggestion of gallerist Ronald Feldman, Andy Warhol produced a series of screen prints (in an edition of 200) and paintings (in an edition of 5) called "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century." Starting with a list of dozens of potential names, Feldman steered Warhol toward the eventual subjects, a group of "Jewish geniuses" who ranged from Martin Buber to Franz Kafka to George Gershwin to the Marx Brothers. With Warhol’s critical standing at a low ebb at the time, the portraits, which Feldman commissioned with Israeli art dealer Alexander Harari, elicited savage criticism: When they were first exhibited at the Jewish Museum in fall 1980, Hilton Kramer, then chief art critic of the New York Times, wrote, “The show is vulgar. It reeks of commercialism, and its contribution to art is nil.”

In the almost three decades since, that critical opinion has been turned on its head. The portraits are now seen not as opportunistic pop schlock but as masterpieces of Warhol’s late oeuvre, and the series is back at the Jewish Museum in “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” on display through August 3. (It then travels to San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, where it opens in October.) ARTINFO talked to the show’s curator, Richard Meyer, who is associate professor of art history and director of the Contemporary Project at the University of Southern California, about the portraits, their complicated history, and Warhol’s legacy.

Richard, can you explain why you thought it was worth looking at these particular Warhol portraits again?

The point of doing this exhibition was to reconsider how the “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” came about, how they were made, and what’s happened to them in the 28 years that they’ve been on the planet.

Do you mean the different ways in which they’ve been interpreted?

Yes. Warhol really opened his work up to the meanings and associations and interpretations of other people. He was the least authoritative artist ever in terms of what a work of art could mean or could be made to mean. Because all of his work is so neutral or affectless you can project onto it whatever you need to get from it.

Is this something that we learn about Andy Warhol from this particular show?

Well, we learn how prescient he was about collaboration — and I don’t mean collaboration in the sense that several people get credit for the making the artwork, because Warhol was very careful that only he got credit at the end of the day. But he was aware that the artist is not the sole maker of a work, or even of its meaning in the world. The idea for the portraits did not come from Warhol, and he was very open about saying that he asked people for ideas. Of course he also said he wished that someone else could make all his work for him.

What else do we learn about him?

That he was just as prescient about the art market. That’s another way in which Warhol still seems relevant.

There’s never been an artist who was more open about his commercial intentions. The year after he did the “Ten Portraits” he did a series of dollar signs, and he constantly talked about his intentions to sell his work for the best price he could find. What’s unusual about Warhol is not that he had those desires — because I think that many artists do — but that he spoke so frankly and openly about them. He was shameless: He didn’t think that it was something that needed to be disguised in the name of polite taste. If you look at Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami — with his Louis Vuitton store in the middle of his exhibition — or any number of artists now, they’re also very open. That seems very Warholian to me.

But this series elicted particularly harsh criticism, didn’t it?

Yes, at the time Warhol was criticized for being commercial with this series. But why was the market seen as a vulgarizing influence? Particularly when the work was about Jews? My argument is that the work was no more or less commercially minded than anything else that Warhol did, and yet it was accused of being so. He was making images of Jews and he was not Jewish himself, and the charge was that that he was making this work for a so-called “synagogue circuit.” Basically, the suggestion was that Jews who didn’t have any taste would buy anything by a famous artist that had a Jewish subject matter — no matter how superficial the maker’s commitment to or knowledge of the subject matter.