Obsessed with people

WILLIAMSBURG Andy Warhol, that enduring mass of Pop art contradictions, dubbed himself "a deeply superficial person."

This utterance was all the excuse the Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William & Mary needed to celebrate its recent acquisition of 150 Warhol photographs with an exhibition opening Saturday in its three second-floor galleries.

The Muscarelle was one of 183 American college and university art museums to receive a gift of Warhol photographs from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The resulting show, "Deeply Superficial: Andy Warhol's 'Voyeurism,'" showcases most of the 1970s and '80s photographs the Muscarelle received -- all taken by Warhol in color with his "Big Shot" Polaroid camera or in black and white with his automatic Minolta 33 mm camera -- in the context of Warhol's silkscreen paintings and films.

"Andy Warhol was obsessed with people," says Muscarelle assistant director Odilia Bonebakker, who is curating the show. "People fascinated him, and he carried a camera around with him all the time. He took photos of celebrities, poets, musicians, socialites and the avant-garde of his time.

"He was star-struck. He took more than 100,000 photographs of people between 1977 and his death in 1987."

Many of the subjects in the small-format snapshots going on view here -- movie star Sylvester Stallone, skater Dorothy Hamill, artist Salvador Dali and modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, for example -- were able to parlay Warhol's promise of 15 minutes of fame into lengthy careers in the global spotlight.

Others -- an unidentified man eating, for instance, or another unidentified man at a Coke machine -- achieved fame only through Warhol's camera.

The show's title drapes the word "voyeurism" in quotation marks.

"We use that term because Warhol was fascinated with people, and it's in quotation marks because Warhol's voyeurism was paradoxical," Bonebakker explains. "It's not voyeurism in the sense of a Peeping Tom. It's voyeurism in the French root sense of the word voyeur, meaning someone who looks. I don't believe Warhol called himself a voyeur, but people have used the term often in connection with him.

"We chose "Deeply Superficial" for the title because it epitomizes the conceptual depth in Warhol's work as a Pop artist. He brings together the concepts of high art and low art. His portraits are simultaneously voyeuristic and exhibitionistic.

"When you look at some of the photographs, you'll literally see people pulling their pants down in public, and our exhibition raises the question of whether Warhol was a voyeur and an exhibitionist in the commonly accepted sense. Like much of Warhol's paradoxical art, it's a question he raises."

The exhibition will proceed in reverse chronological order.

Most of the 1970s and '80s snapshots in the recent gift will be displayed in the first gallery, where a wall panel will make clear Warhol's reason for working both in Polaroid color and in black and white.

The second gallery will demonstrate how Warhol translated his Polaroid portrait images into the silkscreen portrait paintings he created in the 1970s and early '80s.

The third gallery is devoted to 13 of Warhol's lesser-known "living portraits," also called "screen tests," which will be projected on three screens. They are on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

"Warhol made these three-minute film portraits in the 1960s," Bonebakker says. "They are moving images, but Warhol initially called them 'stillies' instead of movies because they play with the relationship between still and moving images. They do this by being essentially film portraits of one person who is instructed to sit very still.

"While Warhol filmed them over three minutes, he later slowed it down to project over four minutes. At first glance, they look like still images, but then they come alive like Harry Potter portraits."

The "stillies," which were made with a 16mm movie camera and later transferred to DVDs for projection, depict such well-known personalities as Dennis Hopper, "Mama Cass" Elliott, Susan Sontag, Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali.

Roy Proctor, a freelance writer and theater director, retired in 2004 as the art and theater writer for The Times-Dispatch. He can be reached at .