Andy Warhol. Flowers (1970), screenprint. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY. On Loan from Bank of America’s Art in Our Communities Program.

At the outset of writing anything about Andy Warhol, it seems like a sure bet that nothing new can be said. Nothing, anyway, that hasn’t already been better articulated by scholars, biographers and filmmakers, by Warhol himself in his published diaries, or even by Lou Reed and John Cale in their album Songs for Drella (the Warhol nickname that fuses Dracula and Cinderella). His trademarks — the painstaking accounting for even small expenditures, the chronic unhappiness with his physical appearance and consequent plastic surgery, the wig, the Factory — seem less like insights and more like distractions that prevent proximity to the “real Andy.”

Warhol himself was famously dismissive of attempts at biographical or psycho-analysis of his work, saying, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

So in response to Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life and Legends, an exhibition of 72 of the superstar pop artist’s silkscreen prints from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, I’ll simply exhort you to go and look.

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