Society Portrait of Susie 1981

Andy Warhol made this portrait of Susie, using silkscreen to flatten form and amplify colour, a trick he learned from commercial printing. I bet he loved the graphic clarity of the black hair against that pale lilac ground, and those graphic red lips - pop perfection! I imagine him, restless in his studio, repeating the image, each time tweaking the color, the registration, the ink. Thinking of that, the black shadow on the neck is like a slash that both defines and destabilizes her form. Warhol was obsessed with celebrity, and with the flattening of surface, and, I mean, that’s what we’re all still obsessed with! He captured a mood, a moment, a shift in how we perceive ourselves and others, that’s still so relevant today. His work reminds us that artists are always in conversation, riffing on each other's ideas across time, and pushing the boundaries of what art can be.