In the plush setting of the Brant, it takes an effort to shake off the comfort his pictures now come with and rediscover the discomfort they once served up. Wagstaff, the curator, was maybe registering something important when he worried that Warhol’s painted soup cans might deliver a deathblow to established notions of painting. When Warhol took money to repeat his early icons they did indeed become “dead paintings,” as he once called them, and those gun-toting bohemians only went wrong in seeing this as a cause for rage, not cogitation. The Marilyn retreads they attacked should help us understand that more than almost any other artist, Warhol was willing to recognize how stuff that starts life looking like art can end it acting like currency. (It’s probably Warhol’s first silk-screened painting; one of the treasures at the Brant is that work’s near-identical twin, showing 196 bills.

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Persons: Brant, Wagstaff, Warhol, ”, Marilyn retreads Organizations: Le Monde, bohemians Locations: Le