When Andy Warhol exhibited his Shadows series at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in February 1979, he wrote, “Someone asked me if I thought they were art and I said no. You see, the opening party had disco. I guess that makes them disco décor.” He then speculated, “The reviews will be bad—my reviews always are. But the reviews of the party will be terrific.”1  But the recent installation of Shadows at the Hirshhorn Museum, organized by Dia Art Foundation, expertly blends art with nightclub.  Much of the exhibition’s appeal stems from the relationship between the Hirshhorn’s unusual curved walls and Warhol’s series of 102 panels laid edge-to-edge, one after another.  The layout underscores the cinematic quality of the series; as the panels’ series of repeating images—each differing only slightly from the others in form and color—enfolds the viewer in a kaleidoscopic panorama.

Installation view of Andy Warhol: Shadows at the Hirshhorn, September 25, 2011–January 15, 2012. Photo: Cathy Carver. Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1978–79. Dia Art Foundation. © 2011 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The donut-shaped Hirshhorn’s curved and seemingly endless wall space seems tailor-made for Shadows. Displayed about one foot above the floor, the panels stretch more than 450 linear feet around the museum’s second-floor gallery. For the first time, the Shadows series can be seen in its entirety, uninterrupted by corners and unbroken into adjoining gallery rooms. When the Friedrich Gallery first hung the work, there was only space for 83 silkscreens, but Warhol saw the parts as a whole: “one painting with 83 parts.”2  Because it is impossible to see all of the canvases simultaneously at the Hirshhorn (largely because of the inner wall of the curved gallery), the space creates the illusion that the unified panels replicate themselves in perpetuity. 

Warhol based his silkscreened and hand-painted panels on a set of shadow photographs taken by his assistant Ronnie Cutrone. Warhol (or his assistants) then applied the silkscreen over monochromatic canvases loosely painted with varying levels of texture and gloss. Somewhat photographically, the silkscreens frequently flip from positive to negative and back again.  The triangular shadows on the left side of each canvas glow against black backgrounds, or the shadows sink into blackness against exhilaratingly colorful environments. The panels flicker from one color to another and the electrifying colors evoke discos and Day-Glo as audacious chartreuses, electric blues and luminous purples glow between canvases of army green, dreary brown, and gray.

Perhaps one of the most surprising features of the Shadows series is its constantly changing texture and finish. Warhol claimed that the work was painted with mops, making it easy to argue that the large, wide and sweeping brushstrokes that lie beneath the silkscreened shadows are a commentary on the masculine bravura strokes of the Abstract Expressionists. Yet the brushstrokes also signal Warhol’s play between the mass-produced and the unique, repetition and chance, evident in much of his oeuvre. Each panel is similar but also different from the next. Even panels based on the same photograph do not look identical—some offer more details of the shadow where those details are obscured in others. A close analysis of the surface reveals more variations. Some panels are washed in thin, translucent paint interrupted by thick and opaque globs. The broad brushstrokes frenetically zigzag across the field like the disco dancers at the work’s first showing. On these canvases, the all-over lusciousness and high sheen play off other canvases that are completely matte and flat. These flattened images extend no visual or tactile lavishness. Instead, they seem sinister and inaccessible compared to their attractive and glossy counterparts. By combining mass production and high art, Warhol finds difference through repetition.

Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1978-79. Dia Art Foundation. © 2011 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson.

 
Though the vibrating colors drive the viewer around the long room, the group of black and white canvases near the middle of the series underscores its cinematic nature. The entire series mimics a giant filmstrip stretched across an elongated wall. Just as a sequence of frames assembles a film, so does the succession of panels complete Shadows, in an analogous part-to-whole relationship. The repetition of similar images over 102 panels recalls Warhol’s early experimentations with stationary cameras and long takes in films such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964). In fact, the triangular shape of the shadows echoes the form of the Empire State Building, the star of Empire.3
  
The most delightful surprise appears at the end of the long row of panels, where a soft blue fluorescent light illuminates and reflects off the final half dozen canvases. It is light from Dan Flavin’s minimalist sculpture untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with respect and affection) in the adjoining gallery that bleeds onto the Warhol canvases. Flavin’s work, over seventy-five feet long, consists of repetitive and modular forms that are analogous to Warhol’s series. The pairing raises a stimulating formal connection between a strict minimalist and a devout pop artist. In a sense, this merging of the two works partially recreates the original viewing experience of many of Warhol’s works. Warhol and Flavin frequently exhibited their work in multimedia and alternative exhibition spaces such as bars and nightclubs. Basking in the light of Flavin’s neon work in the Hirshhorn, all that is missing is a bowl of dried chickpeas, the refrains of the New York Dolls and an elite, eclectic art crowd like those found at Max’s Kansas City in the early 1970s. In such boisterous environments, Warhol’s work frequently became mere wallpaper, overshadowed by the larger-than-life personalities of himself, his superstars, and the milieu of the New York underground. Embracing this phenomenon and the banality of contemporary art, Warhol himself turned Shadows into a decorative background for a 1979 fashion shoot for his magazine Interview, recalling his 1960s Cow Wallpaper. Over thirty years after its first exhibition, Warhol’s Shadows still functions as “disco décor,” just as he would have wanted.4

• 1. Andy Warhol, “Painter Hangs Own Paintings.” New York (February 5, 1979): 10.
• 2. Ibid., 9.
• 3. Attesting to the series’ relationship to cinema, the Hirshhorn’s third floor offers the chance to screen Warhol’s Empire in its original format and two variations on the film in the museum’s Directions: Empire³ exhibition. The other two films included in the exhibition are Douglas Gordon’s Bootleg (Empire) (1997) and Wolfgang Staehle’s Empire 24/7 (1999-2004).
• 4. Warhol, 10.