"The ghosts of Warhol's past reside within these canvases...More than much of his recent work, these canvases give evidence of Warhol's continued evolution as an artist. They all give you something to look at, a combination of decoration and provocation that stops you in your tracks, however briefly. They all have a nervy, challenging air that dares us to take them seriously while also leaving us little choice but to do so." Roberta Smith
Executed in 1985-1986, Map of the Eastern U.S.S.R. Missile Bases (Positive) exemplifies Andy Warhol’s return to the subversive content and style of his earliest work in very last years of his life. Executed in the waning years of the Cold War, the depiction of U.S.S.R. missile bases reads initially as banal, then as chilling as its ominous implication as a document of war becomes clear to the viewer. An iconic example from Warhol’s Black-and-White Ads and Illustrations series, the present work belongs to the discrete sub-group of canvases based on a print media illustration of a U.S.S.R. missile bases map. While Warhol explored the imagery on the more intimate format of a16 x 20 inch canvas, here he has magnified it to an epic scale, with a sly nod to the grand tradition of war painting. Map of the Eastern U.S.S.R. Missile Bases (Positive) is one of the few monumental paintings from this body of work, another example of which resides in the collection of the Tate Modern, London, and another recently featuring as a highlight of the acclaimed retrospective Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which was key in shedding new light on the continuum between Warhol’s early and late work.
Consisting of silkscreen reproductions of newspaper clippings, the Black-and-White Ads and Illustrations represented Warhol’s return to both his origins as an illustrator in the late 1950s, and his hand-copied advertisements and cartoons of the early 1960s. It was through his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983 that Warhol returned to brush-painting after years of abstinence; a commission by gallerist Ronad Feldman in 1984 for a series of paintings and prints based on ads sowed the seeds for his black and white drawings and paintings. Created by tracing advertisements and newspaper illustrations by hand and then silkscreening the imagery onto canvas, these paintings are lent a graphic, hand-painted appearance reminiscent of his early works. As Roberta Smith indeed noted when reviewing works from this series at Warhol’s posthumous exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, “They sum up the elasticity of the Warhol formula: his combination of iconoclastic taste and seductively conventional touch, his brilliant use of a silkscreen technique to both disavow and approximate the look of handmade drawings and paintings,” (Roberta Smith, “7 of Warhol’s Final Paintings”, The New York Times, October 7, 1987, online.)
Though Warhol turned towards the seemingly mundane imagery of newspaper advertisements and illustrations with this series, his choice of imagery reveals a deep exploration of themes of war, death and religion. If Warhol had obliquely explored the rise of communism with his Hammer and Sickles series in the late 1970s, here he unflinchingly confronts the viewer with the Cold War crisis in the wake of Ronald Regan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983, in which he called for a “Strategic Defense Initiative” to “defend America from Soviet Missiles.” The sinister implications of the missile map recall Warhol’s famous Atomic Bomb, 1965, which presents the seemingly endless repetition of a newspaper image of an exploding hydrogen bomb in saturated blood red. While harkening in theme back to his Death and Disaster series from the 1960s, Warhol with the present work zooms in on the threat of the atomic bomb in a more clinical fashion – confronting the viewer with the horrifying threat of nuclear war within the form of an innocent, comic book-like drawing. Indeed, it is only upon closer consideration that the viewer recognizes the ominous portent underlying what is essentially a document of war. The stark black and white schema underpinning this series not only points to its origins in print media, but also hints at the ethical and political poles of good and evil that Warhol explored in the series through “positive” (white) and “negative” (black) variations of the theme.
In the deadpan emptiness of its appropriation, absent of any commentary from the author, Map of the Eastern U.S.S.R. Missile Bases suggests a creeping malaise running underneath the artificial American skin – it implies a society blind to the political reality and potential violence of the Cold War. As Warhol wrote: “America always begins with Moods… But the trouble with moods is that they’re always changing, sometimes really fast… That’s why the American government and the American media are so great. The President, the news magazines, television – they only want to capture America’s mood at the moment, reflect it back, and tell anyone who’s not in the same mood to get over it and start feeling American like everyone else” (Andy Warhol, America, New York, 1985, p. 152). At the heart of this ambivalent commentary is not only the thought that the government is duplicitous in manipulating national feeling, but that to “feel American” is to be homogenous – a concept at the core of Warhol’s varied depictions of postwar American society.