Did you know that Andy Warhol had attended Carnegie Institute of Technology to get a commercial art degree? He mostly worked with silk screening, paint, video and ink drawings. He was mostly famous for his silk screen-printing compositions. People thought that he wasn’t a good artist or even a good person at that. He was shot by a feminist and survived because she felt that he was controlling and abusive. There were other artists that wrote songs about Warhol or even just talked smack about him. My favorite composition that he had created was Skulls in 1976. It consists of multiple canvases of a skull using different colored acrylic paint. Andy Warhol’s Skulls was a great composition that acknowledged that death isn’t something that should be feared but should be accepted as a part of life.
Skulls was a composition by Warhol that stood out amongst the rest. I believe that the display was the perfect example of repetition. Saying this, I am not a person who typically likes repetition, but the way that he changed the colors and patterns among the different canvases kept me interested in the composition. It depicts our fear of death and dying and how it needs to be accepted as a way of life. He says this through the bight colors between the different canvases. Kind of like how the sugar skulls have bright colors to signify the life after death or the celebration of the life that person had while living. Most of us are afraid of death and dying, which Andy portrayed that through his artwork was outstanding. He makes the composition about being everyone and no one at the same time because he doesn’t show skin, hair, nose length, anything like that. So, in reality it could be any of us. John Berger would have the same thing to say that I would.
John Berger became an art critic in the 1950’s and published many essays and reviews in the News Statesman. The News Statesman was a British political and cultural magazine in London. Anything that you find by John Berger has to deal with experience. He does research before talking about a subject; even living in a village to get the full experience. If Berger were to critique Warhol’s Skulls, it would be in a positive manner. Andy did have an obsession with death and the popular culture. Each one of the multiple canvases is singularly distinctive and different than the next. The fact that he used animated tints of the acrylic paint illustrates the contrast between the dark and unnatural matter of the subject. It was very intelligent to use the balance between the warm and cooler shades of color. On the other hand, Walker Percy would have something else to say.
Walker Percy was a failed physician who was raised as an agnostic by his late mother and father in Alabama. He would have lots of negative to say about this composition considering that he is against the “packed experience.” Percy doesn’t do research like Berger does; he just likes to get in there and critique as he sees it. Which is not a bad thing but certainly not a good thing. But, he would go on to say that there is no definition to Skulls and the fact