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Recently
the pop group Duran Duran was looking for a Pop Art setting
in which to tape an interview for MTV. They ended up at a SoHo gallery,
Jose Freire, where the works on view weren't exactly classic Pop
-- like Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol -- but were Warholesque
indeed. They were made by a New York artist, Deborah Kass, who uses
the famous screenprint style with which Warhol immortalized celebrities
like Elvis and Marilyn to celebrate her own heroes -- ranging from
her late grandmother Jeanne Kaufax to Gertrude Stein to Barbra Streisand
to Sandy Koufax (a third cousin, once removed). "Andy would have
loved this," rhapsodized the group's keyboard player, Nick
Rhodes. The artist herself was more blasé. "Nick's very personable,"
she comments. "But he's not Barbra, so what do I care?"
Ms. Kass, 42, has made a name for herself in the art world as the
Jewish lesbian answer to Warhol. She so identifies with the artist
that she has appropriated not only his style but also his image:
In the exhibition (on view through April 8) there is a photograph
of her, in drag, made up to look like the Pop master. "His work
is divine," she says. "I think he was the most sophisticated Pop
artist in that his work was really popular."
Warhol himself did a series of portraits of Jews -- among them Albert
Einstein and Groucho Marx -- but Ms. Kass is on to something else,
says Norman Kleeblatt, a curator at New York's Jewish Museum, who
is planning to include Ms. Kass in "Too Jewish," an exhibit of contemporary
art scheduled for the spring of next year.
"In essence she's appropriating the style and look of Pop Art, and
one assumes on a certain level that she's totally stealing the style,"
Mr. Kleeblatt says. "But Deborah takes Pop Art and makes it funny,
warm and cozy, gives it a pathos. She makes you re-examine the coolness
of Pop as much as she makes you re-examine the absence of any kind
of ethnicity in it."
That is especially true with Ms. Kass' self-portraits, Mr. Kleeblatt
points out. "Instead of Andy's blond countenance, she's putting
a very Jewish ethnic face onto the surface of that canvas -- the
nice Jewish girl from Long Island."
Ms. Kass, who grew up in Rockville Centre and studied at Carnegie
Mellon and the studio program of the Whitney Museum, has not confined
herself only to Warhol's portraits. The show includes her interpretation
of his 1960 piece "Before and Happily Ever After," showing profiles
of a nose before and after rhinoplasty. "The image of the nose job,
when Andy did it, had a different resonance in his community than
in my community, where many girls had nose jobs," Ms. Kass explains.
"My mother wanted me to have a nose job. There was nothing wrong
with my nose. I was chubby, and it was supposed to help your self-esteem."
Also dating from her adolescence is her worship of Ms. Streisand,
a fixation uncommon both in the avant-garde art world and the upper-middle-class
world in which she grew up. "When Barbra hit the scene, people like
my parents disliked her because she was `too Jewish,' " she told
Art in America magazine last year. "Why doesn't she fix her nose,
why doesn't she change her name? But to be an adolescent coming
across Barbra Streisand was the most exhilarating moment of identification....It
was an identification with powerfulness, talent, with being yourself
and being different at the same time."
Among her portraits of Ms. Streisand is a series called "The Jewish
Jackies" -- repeated images of the diva, shown in profile, from
her "Funny Girl" era, that evoke Warhol's multiple portraits of
Jackie Kennedy. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts owns a painting from
the series; a Xeroxed version from 1992, recently acquired by New
York's Museum of Modern Art, is on view through May 9 in an exhibition
of prints entitled "Semblances." Although it's not common for MoMA
to purchase Xerox art, "we liked the images and the ideas," says
Andrea Feldman, the curator who organized the show.
The other pose in which Ms. Kass has depicted her icon is as the
yeshiva boy in "Yentl," the Isaac Bashevis Singer story that Ms.
Streisand turned into a 1983 film. "Yentl, the girl who has to don
male attire to study Talmud and Torah -- that's a good metaphor
for women and making art," Ms. Kass says.
Another icon of Ms. Kass who appears in the Jose Freire show is
Gertrude Stein, a role model because she was Jewish, open about
her homosexuality and an important collector of modern art. Ms.
Kass hung her portraits of Stein and her family next to an image,
repeated 36 times, of Alice Kosmin, a friend of Kass who, with her
husband, Marvin, has amassed a collection of contemporary art. "It's
about the place of Jewish collectors in the avant-garde," Ms. Kass
says. "It all really started with the Steins."
Also, Ms. Kass points out, "Gertrude invented repetition. Without
Gertrude, there'd be no Andy."
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