Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol remained cryptic about the two abstract forms—the “peak” and the “cap”—that recur throughout his Shadows, 1978–79, a sprawling installation of 102 large handpainted and silk-screened canvases, seen here in its entirety for the first time on the West coast. Their possible sources run a delightfully Warholian gamut, ranging from cardboard maquettes to the Empire State Building to erect penises. Warhol attributed the title to a photo of a shadow in his office, which he said the shapes were based on: “It’s a silkscreen that I mop over with paint,” he wrote.

The objects behind the eponymous shadows remain mysterious, but Warhol’s source of funding for the project was never in doubt. Shadows was sold to the Dia Art Foundation in 1979 for a reported $1.6 million, the same year it was first exhibited at Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich’s gallery. And it is easy to see what attracted Friedrich: Warhol’s laconic abstraction, the subtle shifts in surface textures and images, together with the immersive quality of the installation as a whole, seems to align the canvases with the spiritually charged aesthetic associated with other grand projects of Dia’s first decade, epitomized by Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, completed in 1977.

But the spirit behind the series is more downtown than desert. Shadows’s filmstrip repetition of black silk screens against hot monochrome acrylic splits the difference between the dark, drone-based Minimalism of La Monte Young and the louche glamour, stroboscopic flash, and thump of Studio 54, an association Warhol encouraged, calling the installation “disco décor.” “This show will be like all the others,” the artist wrote a week or so after the opening of his 1976 show at Friedrich’s gallery in New York magazine. “The reviews will be bad—my reviews always are. But the reviews of the party will be terrific.”