Flowers

"The most deeply felt praise of Flowers came from Peter Schjeldahl, in 1965 a twenty-two-year-old college dropout, aspiring poet, and rock critic, and several decades away from becoming America's most articulate, clearest-eyes art critic. Kicking around Europe in the mid-sixties, Schjeldahl had 'an epiphany. Actually, two. One was Piero della Francesca. The other was the Flowers paintings,' which he happened to see at Ileana Sonnabend's gallery in 1965. 'They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense. What killed you, killed you, was the grainy black-and-white of the stems. That grainy look with that Day-Glo color was killer, and still is. I think it still hasn't been acknowledged that the whole critical debate should have been over at that moment. Because these Flowers paintings had all the Kantian principles that Greenberg was pushing. Suddenly there were so many things that were supposed to be problems that were not problems. The Flowers resolved all the formal issues Greenberg had been talking about, but with a realistic, not an abstract, image. And why not? Who bought it as a picture of flowers anyway? It was about the mediation. Does it matter how much was going on consciously in him? There were artists at the time who were mulling over the issues very consciously. I don't see him doing that. That's why we reach for the word 'genius.' Genius is what goes, 'That's not a problem.' He sees clearly. He just does it'" (T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).