When Andy Warhol died in 1987, the New York Times listed three possible birth dates in his obituary. His soup cans and portraits of Marilyn Monroe had been known in America for a quarter-century by that point, but much of the rest of his work and life remained cloaked in mystery. He had become easy to caricature as the silver-wigged, status-obsessed court painter of the coastal elite, and his critical reputation was suffering.

A new exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade,” revisits Warhol’s late series of paintings, many of which were not shown until after his death, arguing for their reevaluation. ARTINFO spoke with Joseph D. Ketner II, the curator behind the show, to discuss these works and Warhol's final years.

“Andy Warhol: The Last Decade” will be at the Milwaukee Art Museum through Jan. 3. It will then travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Feb. 14–May 16, 2010), the Brooklyn Museum (June 18–Sept. 12, 2010), and the Baltimore Museum of Art (Oct. 17, 2010–Jan. 9, 2011).

What will people be surprised to see in the show?
Warhol had two sides to his work: his business and painting. The business side we know: making society portraits, being a male model, producing television programs, but what he was quietly doing in his studio, unbeknownst to most everyone in his last decade, were personal, monumental paintings, completely different than anything he had done before.

What was he working on?
He began to do abstract paintings, and he returned to figure painting by hand, like those he had done when he was just beginning as a Pop artist. Most of these were not shown in his lifetime. Warhol in this last 10 years of his life was more productive than at any other phase of his career. He produces more paintings in more series and on a greater scale, using completely different techniques, than at any other phase in his career.

The prints seem to get all of the attention. Why weren’t the large paintings shown more widely?
There are a lot of those prints. The "Flowers" prints, he cranked those puppies out. But the paintings weren’t shown for many possible reasons. The "Oxidation" paintings, for example, which are the seminal pieces that note the change in Warhol at this point, were only shown very briefly in Paris. No American gallery wanted to show pictures that somebody had pissed all over. You know, that’s kind of gross, to put it crassly.

What other series are you including in the show?
There are sets of self-portraits from 1978 that we never saw [during his life]. There are a number of them in which there are multiple exposures, skulls over his head, and “strangulation” ones, in which we see Warhol being choked. As he turned 50 in 1978, he was examining his own mortality. With the strangulation pieces, I’m told that it was Glenn O’Brien, the current editor of Interview magazine, who jokingly came up behind Warhol and put his hands around his neck as he was being photographed for self-portraits. Warhol liked the Polaroids that came from that and screened them.

Where were these previously unseen paintings, and what made you want to show them?
When Warhol died, a lot was left in his estate. A lot of those are in the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which is the principal partner in this enterprise. I wanted to explore how Warhol was working with death. It came to me that the "Last Supper" paintings are also part of his "Death and Disaster" paintings [which featured car accidents and other images in the early 1960s]. They are, in the words of one colleague, the last great disaster paintings. I was wondering, “How do you shape the conversation about Andy Warhol intentionally going back into the studio to paint?”

Why did he go back into the studio in the late ’70s?
One very important thing occurs in the summer of 1977, right before he created his “Piss” paintings: He goes to Paris to attend the opening of the Centre Pompidou. The gallery director there shows him around the museum and around Paris, and he comes back to his studio very excited. He says that he wants to stop doing society portraits. He does the “Oxidation” paintings, the biggest shift in his whole work since he became a Pop artist. He does abstraction for the first time.