Brian P. Hopkins, Ph.D., professor of mathematics at Saint Peter's University, was awarded a 2015 Haimo teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America. He is the first teacher from New Jersey to receive this special honor since the award's inception in 1991.This essay was originally published in (SIC), a Belgian magazine about modern and contemporary art (www.sicsic.be). An abridged version appeared in the September/October 2012 issue of Art New England, and appears here in full for the first time in English.

It is about twenty-five years since Andy Warhol’s death, and history seems to be loath or unable to take full possession of him. While the post-modern 1980s have paled, he looms in the collective rearview mirror. Bits of him, from wisecracks to costly studio products, are never far away. He’s become a kind of “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” which was the name he gave to his indecipherable raptures of sound, light, film, and music in the 1960s.

In April 1988 I gave a paper about Warhol’s Skull paintings at a symposium