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April 20, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Houston women part of Warhol history at Menil

Houston women part of Warhol history at Menil

By Rachel Green | Thresher staff

Within the works of the Menil Collection’s most recent exhibit, ANDY WARHOL: Three Houston Women, lies a quiet reminder of the now-distant artistic and cultural heyday the city of Houston enjoyed during the mid-20th century.

Three series of portraits by Andy Warhol comprise the exhibit. The artist, who reproduced images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Zedong in loud, statement-making hues, was well-admired by the Houston contemporary art scene during the 1960s and ’70s. By the end of the ’60s, the Houston-based de Menils owned one of the largest Warhol collections in the country. Three Houston Women depicts some of the most prominent figures in the collecting and curatorial worlds of modernist art in the city at that time.

Andy Warhol is among the most widely-recognized artists of the 20th century. Quite literally the “poster child” of Pop Art, Warhol was as much of a cultural icon as were the subjects of his paintings. He began his career as a commercial graphic designer, quickly becoming well known in that field early before he decided to bring his printmaking expertise to large-scale fine art works. His subjects range from Brillo Pads to Jacqueline Kennedy to Muhammad Ali. Three Houston Women represents a continuing exploration of this signature style on a smaller, more personal scale.

The largest series in the exhibit, a row of seven stretched linen squares entitled Jermayne MacAgy, greets viewers from the opposite wall as they enter the gallery. MacAgy came to Houston in 1955 to serve as the director of the Contemporary Arts Association. She arranged many innovative exhibitions in this capacity, a practice the de Menils continued after her death. Dominique de Menil commissioned this posthumous series of her friend and artistic mentor in 1968, four years after MacAgy died.

Much less playful than the other two series in the exhibit, Jermayne MacAgy is a study of counterparts: negative and positive, dark and light, presence and absence of color. Utilizing Warhol’s favored printmaking technique — the process of photo silkscreen — the paint is bolder and the images more abstract. For example, the viewer may not be able to quickly discern MacAgy’s cigarette-holding right hand on first glance.

Caroline is most indicative of Warhol’s range of styles. Reminiscent of his Marilyns and Jackies with bold colors dancing around a black silhouette, Caroline depicts an elegant and fashionable Caroline Wiess Law, daughter of one of the founding families of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and benefactor to the Menil Collection. This is the only series owned by the MFAH and not the Menil Collection itself.

Commissioned by Law in 1976, this series features a subject who appears to be sitting for the portrait, intentionally engaging the viewer with a stare that at once exudes power and femininity. Caroline is also the most painterly of the three. While Warhol’s silkscreens usually intentionally retain no trace of human effort, the colorful geometric backgrounds of these canvases are in fact painted with wide, conspicuous brushstrokes. Although Warhol did paint — in fact, his early Campbell’s Soup works were painted and not silkscreened — he usually preferred to hide his artist’s hand behind straight lines and a smooth wash of pigment. Like Jermayne MacAgy, this private serial portrait demonstrates that Warhol’s lesser known works provided him with the opportunity to push his own creative boundaries.

The third and smallest of the series, made up of only three repeated silkscreened images, depicts a laughing, sixty-something Dominique de Menil in delicate shades of pink and green. Dominique, heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil equipment fortune, and her husband John de Menil were avid art collectors throughout the mid-1960s and ’70s. Houston legend says Dominique was not only a great philanthropist and patron of the arts but also a fiercely particular woman. She briefly brought her collections to first St. Thomas University and then Rice University before pulling them from each campus, citing “creative differences,” to construct the Menil Collection in 1987.

Warhol’s Dominique depicts a joyful and engaging woman, its docile pastel palette hiding any hint of the ruthlessly demanding personality she was rumored to have. The lack of black pigment and other bold colors, present if not dominant in many of the artist’s most well-known works, renders the Dominique series one of Warhol’s softest and most human.

Although the exhibit contains a total of only 14 40-by-40-inch square canvases on its three small walls, patrons will not leave the gallery feeling unfulfilled. The simplicity allows the works to engage the viewer without getting lost in the jumble of commercialism and migraine-inducing hues that can sometimes plague Pop Art exhibits. It is also curiously gratifying to be able to actually visualize prominent local figures who are otherwise often known only through the buildings adorned by their names. The fact that Three Houston Women does not call for a long, introspective dialogue with the works renders it accessible to a greater audience that could not care less about art history.

Three Houston Women brings the larger-than-life persona of artist Andy Warhol down to a smaller scale, both through the exhibit’s size and its treatment of local figures in the Houston art scene. Perhaps not sensational enough to draw visitors to the museum on its own, the small exhibit nevertheless provides Menil visitors a peek at yet another segment of a vast and varied collection.

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