In Other Words

Andy Warhol is one of the best-known—but perhaps least understood—artists of the 20th century. “Warhol shifted the paradigm. He shifted the conversation. That's why we're still grappling with him. Love him or hate him,” says Donna De Salvo, the senior curator and deputy director for International Initiatives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who recently organized the blockbuster exhibition "Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again" (on show now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, until 2 September). Beyond the glamour of the celebrity and consumerism so often associated with Warhol, there is something destabilizing about his work, says Dominique Lévy, the co-founder of Lévy Gorvy—which is showing “Warhol Women” in New York (until 15 June). “If you spend enough time in front of a Warhol painting, little by little it unnerves you,” Lévy says. When people fetishize the trophy of the Marilyn, they're missing a certain point of the way that Warhol is constantly disrupting,” De Salvo says: “Whether it's