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About Ego Leonard by Joan Altabe

Ego Leonard comes across like clip art in three dimensions, like some poor cousin of “Unconditional Surrender,” like some nettlesome member of the Pop art family -that clan of colorable repute of the ’60s in rebellion against abstract expressionism’s inwardness. Ultimately, though, it gave us skin-deep Warhol, who was given to repeating images – Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, even the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband’s assassination – and turned our perception numb. Warhol said it himself in exhibit notes for his first retrospective in Stockholm in 1968:
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings…and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

Ego Leonard strikes me that way – “nothing behind it” – a bad joke that extols the art of shallowness. It’s enough to send this writer who shrinks from the excesses of Baroque art running to it for relief.