The Warhol Museum

Reflected (Zeitgeist Series) 1982
Acrylic Silk Screen

Entering into one of the bigger spaces in the gallery, you cannot help being drawn to this piece. Printed on a tall and very long canvas, the size alone is impeccable. Then you realize that the actual silkscreen being repeated is tiny in comparison to the canvas it is printed on.

Horizontal stripes of the most primary shades of red, green, and blue serve as the background over which the black silk screen is printed. Having no prior understanding of what “zeitgeist” means, (using the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, Zeitgeist is defined as: The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age) I assumed it was some piece of machinery, such as a lie detector, which records data through a series of repeated lines. However, upon returning and discovering the true definition, I am left wondering what the image, with its vertical lines and single horizontal line at the bottom, really is. It must be of some significance to society, culture, or one of Warhol’s common themes because it was repeated so many times and then given a name alluding to its “genius” and significance to the atmosphere of the time.

Returning to the composition of the piece, the seamless repetition of the process of silk screening the same image over and over, in a bold and completely opaque shade of black, deserves attention. Fitting together like a puzzle, the math and understanding of space demonstrates the skill with which Warhol has mastered his craft. Not a single print is partial and, without an understanding of his process, one might assume that, rather than a small screen repeated over and over, it is a large screen repeated in three rows corresponding to the underlying colors. Although the overbearing shade in view is the bold black of the print, the primary colors mentioned above poke through giving the image a different look as the stripes of color change. Even after a deeper investigation has revealed to me that I do not understand this piece as I originally thought I had, it does not diminish the lasting memory this piece has had on me out of the entire museum.