Warhol Does Blood on the Highway

Pop artist and 60s culture icon Andy Warhol is probably best known for his psychedelic portraits of figures such as Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s Soup Can. Less frequently remembered is his automotive art, which spanned his entire career and included a BMW M1 art car that actually raced in Le Mans, paintings commissioned by Mercedes-Benz, and a whole run of grisly car-crash pieces from the early 60s. Reproducing tabloid photos against garish background colors, Warhol’s “death and disaster” series has likely inspired generations of bad-taste police to permanently bracket the word “art” in big showy scare quotes. Pictured here is a single frame from Warhol’s “Five Deaths Eleven Times in Orange,” capturing the poignant moment at which two teenage survivors emerge from a rollover wreck and realize that their friends didn’t make it. The appealing candy hue and the repetition of the image turn the tragedy into a spectacle, a theme that shows up in other Warhol works such as “Green Car Crash,” which sold last week for almost $72 million and which features a burning car with its driver impaled on a spike halfway up a telephone pole. Exploitive, sure, but it also hints at the ways in which the violence of the coming decade would be packaged by the media for the public’s viewing pleasure.