Artistic repetition and anxiety about becoming passé

Artistic repetition and anxiety about becoming passé is a recurring concern in Andy Warhol’s 1981 diary: the return to familiar Pop images might be either a viable artistic method or proof that his best ideas were behind him. His entries connect that uncertainty to changing fashions, anticipated reviews, the economics of exhibition, and the uncomfortable distance between being well-known and making work he considered good.

Returning to familiar images

Looking through a book of his earlier paintings, Warhol saw the clever things he used to do and felt unable to think of anything equally clever in the present. He wondered whether he should make Campbell’s Soup Cans again. The idea arose while Chris Makos was telling him that Julian Schnabel was becoming prominent and that abstract expressionism was returning; Makos offered to bring over a can of Campbell’s Won Ton soup, whose oriental lettering suggested a possible new subject. The episode gives repetition a double edge: an old format might be reopened through a changed image, but Warhol’s own uncertainty made the proposal feel like a response to dwindling invention.

Anticipating the verdict

As he worked on paintings of the Wicked Witch and Howdy Doody, alongside Mickey and Garbo images brought by Rupert Smith, Warhol imagined reviewers asking how he could be making the same kind of work twenty years later. The fear was not simply that the images were familiar; it was that their return would be read as belatedness. He also resented the terms of the show at Ron Feldman’s gallery. Money had to be secured from the gallery, and Warhol felt the exhibition chiefly generated publicity for it while he deserved more payment. Artistic uncertainty therefore sat beside a practical imbalance: he was making the paintings for a show he disliked, while questioning both its compensation and its artistic rationale.

Repetition as success and failure

In September, Warhol’s nervousness sharpened when the Rolling Stones received glowing reviews for repeating an old album. Their reception supplied an immediate contrast: repetition could be praised as continuity, yet Warhol feared that his own return to old Pop images would be dismissed. The diary does not resolve why the same broad gesture should be welcomed in one case and suspected in another; it records the unequal judgments as part of his anxiety about whether his work still mattered.

Recognition without production

At a museum tour of an exhibition featuring Gauguin and Henry Moore, Warhol encountered roughly forty enormous figures Moore had given the museum. Their scale made his own work seem like nothing beside them. He turned from that comparison to a more personal complaint: he was always touring while everyone else worked, and being well-known did not mean he was producing good work—or, as he judged it then, producing anything. The concern thus extends beyond repeating images to a broader fear that public visibility and social activity were taking the place of artistic production. The entries preserve that fear without offering a resolution.