((PKG))  ANDY WARHOL   
((Banner:  The Arts;  All of Warhol)) 
((Reporter/Camera:  Genia Dulot)) 
((Map:  San Francisco, California)) 
 
((NATS – Exhibit)) 
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern 
Art))  
Most people think of a Warhol as a pop artist: light-hearted, about 
consumer goods, Coca-Cola, some Campbell Soup, a Brillo box.  
That was a tiny, tiny brief chapter in Warhol’s career, because 
immediately, the next year, the idea of death, of mortality enters 
his work.   
Warhol came from a very poor working class family.  They were 
immigrants from a far east part of Slovakia.  They were Byzantine 
Catholics, and the icon, you know, the image of Virgin on the gold 
ground, was something that Warhol grew up with.  
In 1962, he decided to do a picture of Marilyn Monroe, and I think 
he treated her as an icon.  He did many images of Marilyn, 
sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, or silver, but it 
was always the same image.  So that Marilyn was a timeless 
goddess.  She was immortal.  
Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor was someone of our 
world, earthly, that she was mortal.  And so, he starts with her as 
a young woman, and in this painting, you see at very top, a very 
photographic, almost, kind of image.  And it flickers across this 
large canvas, sometimes fading, sometimes being saturated, and 
by the time you get to the bottom of the canvas of the far edge, 
she is almost completely disappeared and faded away.  And I 
think this is a kind of metaphor for mortality, that we, in the bloom 
of youth, we also see the beginnings of a life and death. 
Warhol was not just a simple reflection of the culture.  He was 
critically responding to the culture and to the existential issues of 
human life, which are always with us.  We can never avoid the 
issues of life and death.  And, I think, that’s part of the reason that 
Warhol is such a profound artist and why he is so relevant today.  
((NATS – Exhibit)) 
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern 
Art))  
So, here we are looking at a portrait of a woman named Ethell 
Scull.  Andy took her to Times Square, and told her to be happy, 
be sad, be pensive, be flamboyant, and then assembled a group 
of these portraits by silk screening them on canvas with different 
colored grounds and made a multiple portrait of Ethel Scull.  So, 
Ethel would be just as famous as Marilyn or Liz.   
And I think this is the birth of our culture that we are immersed in 
right now, the obsession with the selfie, with the Instagram, with 
creating an identity out of the image of one’s self. 
((NATS – Exhibit)) 
((Gary Garrels, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern 
Art))  
Well, we are standing in front of the series that Warhol did in 1964 
called “The Most Wanted Men.”  And these come from a New 
York police bulletin of criminals that the police felt were the most 
important to try to catch, you know, to put in jail, that they were 
the most dangerous ones.  So, I think by making “The Most 
Wanted Men” from the police bulletin, the subject was sort of the 
counterpoint, or a, kind of, metaphor for his own identity as a gay 
man, that he was a criminal, that he was an outsider.  So, the idea 
of, again, identity is a very profound, fundamental issue in 
Warhol’s work.  And again, he was far ahead of our time, that we 
are only catching up to now, that the issue about sexual identity is 
unstable, it could be fluid, and what was once illegal, what was 
outside the law, has now been actually embraced by society, that 
that’s one of the revolutions of our time. 
((NATS – Exhibit))