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That's why the American government and the American media are so great. The President, the newsmagazines, television - they only want to capture America's mood at the moment, reflect it back, and tell anyone who's not in the same mood to get over it and start feeling American like everyone else.
- Andy Warhol1
Andy Warhol's Death and Disaster paintings remain at the center of an enduring, and still essentially unresolved, ideological polemic in Warhol scholarship: whether the artist passively reflected media images in a complacent glorification of consumerism, or purposely manipulated them in a subversive critique of postwar American commodity culture. Warhol's Disaster theme emerged in paintings of the 1960s and dominated the artist's production throughout his career, even though the sensationalists works contradicted common notions of American Pop Art during the Cold War. Depictions of car wrecks, suicide leaps, electric chairs, police brutality, most wanted criminals, and atomic explosions provided striking contrast to the cool consumer goods and idyllic suburban icons that defined Pop Art to American audiences in many domestic exhibitions throughout the early 1960s. The Disaster paintings raise significant but still unanswered questions of aesthetic agency, political intention, and critical distance over mass-media imagery and spectacle.
Of these paintings, however, the discrete group of screenprinted canvases that Warhol produced between 1962 and 1964 and collectively titled Death in America carries particular significance. In a now famous and frequently quoted 1963 interview with critic Gene Swenson, an interview that was especially candid on account of Swenson's hidden microphone,2 Warhol explained his conception of the group:
We went to see [the first James Bond film] Dr. No at Forty-second Street. [...] We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them - it's just part of the scene - and hurting people. My show in Paris is going to be called "Death in America". I'll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures.3
When asked why he started painting death images, Warhol continued,...