In 1963, just as pop art was getting famous, Andy Warhol, its coolest exponent, told an interviewer he painted the way he did because: “I want to be a machine.” It was a great line – and it makes a provocative title for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s stimulating juxtaposition of his work with that of the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. If it had any truth, Warhol failed in his ambition: there is nothing remotely machine-like about his art. Emotion and desire beat through it as insistently as Lou Reed’s staccato rhythm guitar in I’m Waiting for the Man, by the Velvet Underground, the house band at Warhol’s studio.
One of the early drawings in this exhibition anticipates that song about addiction. Entitled The Nation’s Nightmare, it depicts a young man injecting heroin. Warhol drew it in 1951 to advertise a radio documentary series about America’s “social problems”. Yet it is in no way a hack job. There’s a sensuous compassion in his portrait of the youth, an empathy intensified by Warhol’s adoring delineation of his beautiful face. For years, biographers wrote about Warhol’s career as a commercial artist in New York in the 1950s as, at best, a preliminary to his real art. At worst, it was proof of his true nature as a commercial sellout. The superb selection of his 50s drawings makes that cynical view of him seem plain stupid.
Warhol depicts the streets of New York with a passionate eye that reveals his inner seriousness. In Head of a Girl and Children, done in 1958-61 and based on a photograph, he sketches kids playing on the street, but focuses on a face in the foreground looking straight out at us. It’s the face of someone who is not at ease in the crowd, someone who feels different, unhappy, alone. The same kind of unease kept appearing in Warhol’s art in whatever medium he got a hold of. In one of the stitched-together photo-works he made in the 80s, a shiny handgun rests on a paperback of Liddell Hart’s History of the First World War. The gun is positioned so the barrel points towards us as we read the words: “World War.”
The last thing I expected from this exhibition was a troubling comment on the first world war and its legacy of violence. But that’s Warhol: always another surprise up his sleeve. He was a social, political and technological prophet whose ideas we’re still catching up with.
While the early drawings here include a gorgeous suite of late 50s homoerotic portraits and an almost Caravaggesque study of a youth in tight jeans, there is also a powerful sequence of Polaroids in which he tries out a female identity. He poses in wigs, wearing bright red lipstick that shines luridly from the camera flash. Completely unsmiling, he just stands there, bluntly real.
Warhol’s self-portraits – taken in passport photo booths in the 60s and after 1970, with his trusty Polaroid camera – anticipate yet another 21st-century phenomenon. Yes, here are Warhol’s selfies. From an early 60s image of him in a mac and dark glasses to a 1981 Polaroid in which his ageing uneasy face is caught up close in sharp light, casting a large shadow, here is proof that Warhol was fascinated by instant self-portrayal decades before cameraphones made everyone famous for 15 minutes.
But if only we took selfies like this, the world would look itself in the eye. It takes the honesty of Warhol to show the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait. These are not pictures in which someone poses proudly, comically or sexily. They are relentlessly self-observant studies that ask, again and again, who Warhol really is. It doesn’t matter if he is wearing drag or meditating on his own deathly shadow. In every self-portrait he drew, painted or photographed (and for him these processes were interchangeable), what we see is someone’s intense critical focus on his own raw reality. This is me. Is that me?
Thirty-one years after his death, Warhol remains far ahead of us on the road to the future. Eduardo Paolozzi, meanwhile, belongs to the recent past. His chunky sculptures and complex collages are museum-bound in a way Warhol’s work is not. They make an odd couple. While Warhol was so eerily at one with the world, Paolozzi comes across in this exhibition as endlessly pugnacious and awkward. Perhaps Paolozzi really did want to be a machine, in the way some small children want to be robots. There is sometimes a sense here of a kid tinkering with Meccano (well, I said he belongs in the past). Yet he helped change art’s relationship with the world around it.
Warhol said the pop artists painted “all the great modern things”. Paolozzi started praising those great modern things in the 1940s. This Scottish-born pioneer got hold of American magazines from GIs he met in postwar Paris, and started making collages of fast cars, lipsticks and an advert for “Real Gold Pure California Orange Juice”. Some of the fragile originals are shown here as well as facsimiles of his Bunk series, in which a fantasy landscape of sci-fi robots and pinups is created out of pulp magazine art.
The word “pop” appears precociously in one of the Bunk collages. Paolozzi was dreaming of America in an austere 1940s and 50s Britain. California orange juice was a utopian fantasy for him. Warhol, on the other hand, grew up in the world he was dreaming of. Perhaps it is because we now share that reality of instant consumerism that it’s Warhol who seems more relevant and alive as an artist.
But I don’t think it’s just that. Paolozzi made clever and thoughtful art about the machine age, but his concept of art itself was traditional. Bronze sculptures, fine art prints – you sense he had an erudite audience in mind. Warhol transcends pop art because he saw how art could and must change in an information age. His readiness to break out of the art world and into mass culture made him the first and greatest artist of our own time. There seems no end to this unlikely genius.
• At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, from 17 November to 2 June.
