SFMOMA, Part 29: Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
He is ten feet wide and he is drawing on you. Three times.
Elvis Presley stands in a cowboy's stance — legs apart, arm extended, pistol leveled straight at your chest — and he does it three times across the canvas, left to right, like frames of a film strip that forgot to move. The background is silver. Not gray. Silver, the color of the Factory walls in 1963, the color of movie screens before the lights go down, the color Warhol reached for when he wanted something to feel like a ghost and a machine at the same time. Up close the surface is rough: spray paint, silkscreen ink, the image breaking into grain the way a photograph breaks into grain when you enlarge it past what it can hold. From across the room, though, the three Elvises lock into formation, and the whole ten feet of linen starts to feel like a standoff you walked into by accident.
Andy Warhol, Triple Elvis [Ferus type], 1963 — silver paint, spray paint, and silkscreen ink on linen, 82 1/4 × 118 1/2 in. (209 × 301 cm). The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA. On view on Floor 4 in Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, part of Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10. Entry included with general admission (SFMOMA, 151 Third Street; Mon–Tue 10–5, Wed closed, Thu 12–8, Fri–Sun 10–5).
The easy reading is: pop art, celebrity worship, the King of Rock and Roll times three. But the subject is sharper than that. This is not a painting about Elvis. It is a painting about what happens when a movie still gets promoted to scripture — and about the fact that Warhol's whole career as a Pop artist started not in New York, but in Los Angeles, in a gallery the size of a living room, because of pictures like this one.
1928–1962: The illustrator who learned to stop drawing
Andrew Warhola was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, the son of Slovak immigrants, and he spent the 1950s as one of New York's most successful commercial illustrators — shoe ads, magazine work, the whole apparatus of American desire rendered in blotted-line ink. Then, around 1960, he started painting by hand the things other people printed: comic strips, advertisements, soup cans. In 1962 he picked up the silkscreen, and everything changed. The screen let him do what he had always wanted: make a painting the way the culture made images — mechanically, repeatedly, without the artist's hand getting in the way.
His first Pop solo show was not in New York. It was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, in July 1962 — thirty-two Campbell's soup cans, one per canvas, hung in a row like products on a shelf. New York's art world barely noticed. Los Angeles did. And a year later, in the fall of 1963, Warhol sent Ferus a second show: the Elvises. Twenty-two silkscreened Elvises, all struck from the same publicity still — Elvis as a cowboy, gun drawn, from the 1960 film Flaming Star — in various combinations: single, double, triple, silver, black. The works from that show are still called the Ferus type, and this is one of them.
Think about what that means. The most famous painting in this building's collection of Warhols is a California painting. Warhol's Pop career was launched by a Los Angeles gallery owner (Irving Blum, who also bought the soup cans himself when nobody else would). The silver Elvises were made for the West — for the place that invented the cowboy as an export product.
1963: Silver
The silver matters. In 1963 Warhol covered the walls of his new studio at 231 East 47th Street in silver foil and paint, and the Factory got its name and its look: everything reflective, everything a surface. Silver was Warhol's color for death and for movies at once — the silver screen, the silver of a gun, the silver of the Silver Marlon and Silver Liz paintings he was making the same year. Elvis in silver is Elvis embalmed in his own fame: the cowboy as funerary object.
And the tripling matters. Warhol didn't paint Elvis three times; he printed him three times, which is different. Repetition is the whole argument. One Elvis is a portrait. Three Elvises are a broadcast. The image is no longer a picture of a person; it is a signal, and the signal degrades a little with each pass, which is the most honest thing about it. Fame, in Warhol's accounting, is just an image that has been copied until the original is irrelevant.
There is also money in this painting's shadow. A sister work from the same series — also a triple Elvis, from the collection of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia — sold at Christie's New York in November 2014 for $81.9 million. The Fishers' version hangs here, in public, in San Francisco, for the price of a museum ticket. Donald Fisher's stated collecting principle was to never buy an artist he couldn't sell at auction; the joke of the Fisher Collection is that the trophy wall turned out to be a public trust.
June 2016: The elbow
This painting has a scar, or nearly one. In June 2016, two weeks after the expanded SFMOMA reopened, a visitor posing for a photograph tripped and fell backward into it — elbow first, into the most valuable surface in the room. The museum pulled the painting, sent it to conservation, and rehung it days later with what the conservators described as minimal contact. No press release. Just a quiet repair.
I love that story, and not because of the schadenfreude. It is the perfect Warhol incident: a person trying to photograph themselves in front of a silkscreened photograph of a movie still, falling into the image. The audience kept trying to merge with the broadcast. Warhol would have understood completely. He spent his career predicting the moment when looking at fame and being fame became the same activity. The visitor just got there a little too literally.
The show, again
Stand in front of it now and notice what the silver does to the room. The painting doesn't hang on the wall so much as project into it — ten feet of metallic ground that catches the gallery light and throws it back at you. The three Elvises are identical and not identical: the silkscreen misregisters, the ink pools differently, one gun is a little heavier than the others. The machine stutters. That stutter is the only handmade thing left in the picture, and Warhol left it in on purpose. Perfection would have been a lie. The image is mass-produced, but the flaws are originals.
Walk the length of it. At the left Elvis you are looking at a movie star. By the right Elvis you are looking at a logo. Somewhere in the middle, the person disappears. That is the whole of Pop art in ten feet of linen, and it was made for Los Angeles, in 1963, by a man from Pittsburgh who understood America better than Americans did.
I keep coming back to the gun. It is pointed at the viewer — at you, at me, at everyone who stands here trying to take the perfect photo. Sixty years later, the King is still drawing first. 🌁
Timeline — Andy Warhol
1928 — Born Andrew Warhola, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Slovak immigrant parents
1949 — Moves to New York; becomes a top commercial illustrator through the 1950s
1962 — First silkscreen paintings; thirty-two Campbell's soup cans shown at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, in July — his first Pop solo show
1962–63 — Makes 22 Elvis silkscreens from a Flaming Star publicity still; the Ferus show of fall 1963 gives them their name
1963 — Covers the new Factory in silver; the silver paintings (Triple Elvis, Silver Marlon) follow
1968 — Shot by Valerie Solanas; survives, and the work goes darker
1987 — Dies in New York after gallbladder surgery, age 58
2014 — A sister triple Elvis sells at Christie's New York for $81.9 million
2016 — A visitor elbows the SFMOMA painting; conservation repairs it in days
Today — Triple Elvis [Ferus type] on view, 151 Third Street