Pop Politics Starts at the Currier

Andy Warhol’s portraits displayed in Pop Politics flash back to bygone political times.
A blue-green image of Richard Nixon with yellow lips and teeth floats atop the slogan: "Vote McGovern".
And then there are the Kennedys -- among Warhol's favorite subjects:
Jackie Kennedy before the assassination with a dark cloud of hair against a blazing red background. And then glimpses of the widow in shades of blue.
Sharon Matt Atkins curates the show.
ATKINS2: Warhol really tapped into the culture of his time and was really able to reflect it back in a way that I don't think anyone has since. It was his response to commercial images -- but the way that images proliferated in the media.
Warhol based his portraits on photographs -- taken from news accounts and campaign posters.
Some also came from his own polaroids. He’d taken tens of thousands of snapshots by the time he died in 1987.
Using the photos, he'd often add color and design during the silk screen process.
As for Warhol's politics, he is said to have admitted voting only once.
ATKINS3: Warhol's official status was always that he was neutral. He always feared if he appeared too biased, then he might not get a commission.
After all, says Matt Atkins, Warhol wanted world leaders to seek him out for their portraits.
Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Rockefeller, British royalty, and the Shah and Empress of Iran all have portraits at the Currier show.
And there's more.
On exhibit are thank you notes to Warhol from Nancy Reagan and Robert Kennedy; a postcard from a fan urging Warhol to run for mayor of New York; and postage stamps -- an example of his penchant for the repeated, stock image.
That repetition is perhaps best on display on an entire wall devoted to the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.
In the ten portraits, the same image of Mao appears in different color combinations.
He’s green-faced with pink lips, yellow-faced with blue lips. And on and on.
The effect is to make the stern-faced Mao look a bit foolhardy.
It also makes him seem like yet another manipulatable consumer product, a favorite Warhol theme.
Ted Wilkinson, of Northwood, was at the show on a recent evening.
Wilkinson: The endless repetition of images or ideas sometimes can lose their potency and yet the way that Warhol did it, the way he frames it, the way he uses color overlying the same image in many different ways, flips that on its head and makes you look more intently at the content of the image.
It's hard to visit this show without imagining Warhol's take on the current campaign.
He'd probably master the newest media technologies -- Warhol was a magazine publisher, television producer, and film director.
You can watch excerpts of some of his films at the Currier.
And his notion that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes seems to predict YouTube.
Andy Warhol: Pop Politics is on view at the Currier until January 4.
For NHPR News in Manchester, I'm EG.