Chinese Silk

Chairman Mao silkscreens by Andy Warhol 
at the Portland Art Museum.

I went to a lecture on Warhol's silkscreens by Blake Gopnik, who is writing a biography of the artist. I learned several things about Andy Warhol that I hadn't known, and that further enhanced his reputation in my eyes. He was a modernist pioneer who pushed the boundaries of "art" and "craft" in an effort to erase the snobbish divisions between them.

Silkscreening is a uniquely American process, invented here in 1938, first used industrially for applications like decorating trucks and printing wallpaper, then adopted by artists. Warhol and his boyhood friend Philip Pearlstein were among the first.

Some art dealers and museums snubbed the technique because of its humble background. If they showed silkscreen art at all, they renamed it "serigraphy" in an effort to raise its status.

Isn't it amusing that silk, long associated with China, is the basis of the technique used by a quintessentially American artist in his famous images of Chairman Mao.