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

Photo by John Aquino

Richard Meyer at The Jewish Museum, New York

© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society, New York, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Andy Warhol, "Sarah Bernhardt" from "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" (1980)

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No. Nor do I think he was particularly pro-Semitic, if that’s a word. It doesn’t seem to me that he thought deeply about it. The reason the charge of anti-Semitism was leveled was not because he was dealing with stereotypes — he didn’t exaggerate people’s noses or put horns on their heads — but because people felt he didn’t have an authentic or deeply felt relation to Jewishness. But Warhol shows us that superficiality — making judgments on the basis of images — is a reality of our culture.

In 1975 he did a portrait of Golda Meir, and when the New York Times asked him why, he said, “Oh, I’ve always loved her! I think she should run for president [of the United States], maybe with Jackie O. as her vice president.” Of course, one of the reasons why he suggested those two women was because he had painted them. He was interested in their images. I don’t think he had any deep sense of Meir’s policies. He was operating in a world of images, and his concerns had to do with celebrity and fame and money and power.

Still, his interest in the images seems to have led him to a rather more involved artistic process than he often employed.

What he really did care about with this series were the faces. He was presented with choices of which source image to use, and from the source image he made a drawing, and from the drawing he made an acetate which became a collage, and from the collage he made a test print. Then he would choose which of the test prints would become the editioned print, and then from the print he made paintings. It was a much more sustained and complex procedure than was necessary. For whatever reason, Warhol put a lot of artistic labor into this series, but he thought of it as a visual problem, like artists do, rather than a historical or cultural or religious one.

So, having worked on this exhibition, what’s your conclusion about Andy Warhol?

I’d say he’s one of the most influential, if not the most influential, artists of the 20th century.