The 25-foot long “Camouflage Last Supper,” one of Andy Warhol’s last and most personal works, floods a full wall of a room on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The massive acrylic and silkscreen mural captures the artist’s seemingly contradictory piety and irreverence. It’s one of more than 350 works on display in the largest retrospective of Warhol’s prolific career in nearly 30 years.
While Warhol’s style has remained ubiquitous since his death in 1987, even the most devout pop-art connoisseurs can learn much from “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again.” It includes famous works as well as material on view for the first time. Newly revealed information about the painfully private artist’s life adds new dimensions to our understanding of him and his work.
“There is something in his work that speaks to our contemporary culture,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s deputy director for international initiatives and senior curator, who organized the exhibition with Christie Mitchell and Mark Loiacono. “There is punch in Warhol’s work, there’s mystery, and it’s not easy to know what’s going on.”