Warhol. UK.

"Once upon a high time Andy Warhol's films were a revolution," recalls Glenn O'Brien in the Times of London. "I was a college student in the late 60s. I had been educated by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, but the films of urgent interest were those of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Warhol. I remember sitting through a whole evening's showings of Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys. It's hard to imagine today, but back then a Warhol film was a glimpse of a new world, a strange, weird, compelling, funny, scary world. Warhol film was for the initiated, and so it was also initiatory." Via Sujewa Ekanayake. And Gaby Wood talks with O'Brien for the Observer.

Not only is London's BFI Southbank running "the most complete retrospective of Andy Warhol's cinema ever held" through September, but the exhibition Warhol: A Celebration of Life... and Death is open at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh through October 7.

"Andy Warhol's painting Suicide (Silver Jumping Man) offers one very obvious reason why a man famous in his lifetime for portraying the famous, scorned by so many critics as the starstruck nemesis of serious art in America and dead now for two decades, is one of the most urgent artists of our time," argues Jonathan Jones.

"What has time done to an art based on images that were once so familiar anyone could 'recognise them in a split second in the street,' as Warhol said, but which are now instantly recognisable only as Warhols?" asks Laura Cumming in the Observer. "As the years recede, death does seem to be Warhol's subject: his forte."

Tim Cornwell reports for the Scotsman: "Although Edinburgh saw a show of the artist's self-portraits two years ago, Scotland has never hosted an exhibition on this scale, says Keith Hartley, chief curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.... Pieces rarely seen in Europe appear in this exhibition, including 1980s works based on advertising, and a group of large skull paintings that fill one room."

For the Telegraph, Alastair Sooke focuses on the Time Capsules: "He came to see them as a conceptual artwork in their own right, a sprawling self-portrait that also captured the spirit of his age."

Back in the London Times, Joanna Pitman wanders the exhibition and decides that "the area of his life richest in revelation is the period between his arrival in New York in 1949 and his breakthrough in 1962, with the exhibition of his Campbell's Soup paintings."

Earlier: Amy Taubin talks with Gus Van Sant about Warhol for Sight & Sound.

Posted by dwhudson at August 5, 2007 5:06 PM