Exhibitions: MoMA Oxford: Love is Enough - William Morris & Andy Warhol

Love is Enough

William Morris & Andy Warhol, Curated by Jeremy Deller.

Love is Enough brings together two artists who, through their all-consuming drive to share their ideas with a mass audience, their obsessive personalities and their innate sense of what we would now call branding, left an indelible mark on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

William Morris and Andy Warhol are not the most obvious of bedfellows. They came from different eras, social backgrounds and countries. Yet when viewed from the perspective of a contemporary artist such as Jeremy Deller, who refers to both as major inspirations in his own work, their varied practices begin to connect in several distinctive areas.

Love is Enough examines four points of connectivity. Beginning with a comparison of their individual mythologies and the personalities - both fictional and real - that influenced their early lives, Deller assembles a world entitled 'Camelot' (after the name given to the ill-fated Kennedy presidency and King Arthur's legendary court); populated by movie stars alongside the 'Knights of the Round Table'.

The next area examines the artists' political motivations and pursuits. In one of the texts for this publication, in conversation Eric Shiner- Director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - describes Warhol as a 'liberal fiscal conservative'. Morris on the other hand, is well known for describing his conversion to Socialism as 'crossing the river of fire'. The works in this section look at how politics - described by Deller as their 'Hopes and Fears for Art' - because a fascination for both artists, albeit with contrasting degrees of application and emotional investment.

Inevitably, both artists turned their individual practices into lines, products and ranges, which could be aimed at specific clientele and produced in large quantities.

Equally, they both shared a colourful life in print. Warhol initiated Interview magazine as a means of meeting famous people whose portraits he would hope to paint. Morris established The Commonweal, as a vehicle for many of his political beliefs. Both produced multiple publications, many of which were elaborate and complex in their construction and design and where they found their voice.

Lastly, their mutual love of pattern and iconography inspired by nature is explored in a visually intense section entitled 'Flower Power'. A combination of tools, sketches, collages and finished work directly explores the power of nature. Both artists used specifically used flowers- and their abstraction - in repeat designs for wallpapers, textiles and prints, purposefully employing image- making as a device for masking out or papering over the ugly mechanics of the industrial worlds they both lived in.