Peter Schjeldahl, in his wonderful “No Escape,” in this week’s issue, compares a Whitney Museum roomful of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” to “a chromatic car wash – you emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling.” It’s a great line by a devout Warholian who’s written many inspired lines about his hero. In his “Going Pop” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2012), he says of Warhol’s Day-Glo pink and chartreuse Elsie the Cow wallpaper, “My breath still catches when I behold that bovine Hallelujah Chorus.” Schjeldahl loves that wallpaper. He’s commented on it in all three of his New Yorker Warhol pieces. In “Warhol in Bloom” (March 11, 2002), he writes,
Uncharacteristically infected with hubris, he bade farewell to the art world with a quintessentially nineteen-sixties show of shocking-pink and chartreuse cow wallpaper and drifting Mylar balloons. I recall the opening, at which the stoned mood was a kind of exquisite stupidity.
And in his new piece, he says,
Speaking of color, a room in which many of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” of the sixties adorn his chartreuse-and-cerise “Cow Wallpaper,” from the same period, is like a chromatic car wash. You emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling.
That line makes me smile. Millions of words have been written about Warhol’s ingenious art, but I’ll bet no one has ever before compared it to a “chromatic car wash.” Schjeldahl’s image perfectly conveys the wet-in-wet splashy brilliance of its subject.
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