Another item to note is that The Death and Disaster Series was not just about car crashes (and therefore the lack of safety features in cars), but also included images of airplane crashes, the electric chair, atomic bombs, race riots, and even tuna fish cans, after Warhol saw a news item about the death of two people from food poisoning after eating contaminated tins of tuna. The painting by Warhol below left, titled Green Car Crash from 1963, shows Warhol's method of repeating the image over and over again, and then coloring the whole canvas with a bright color, which helps to reduce the brutality of the images. Warhol's "Electric Chair," 1963, is shown below right; both are from The Death and Disaster Series.
Part of Warhol's idea with the multiple-image paintings was described in an Art News interview where he said: "But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn't have any effect." So with these paintings, Warhol is commenting on how the daily repetition of pictures of death and destruction that he was seeing in the newspaper and on tv was numbing the public to the true horror of the various situations. You can see how Warhol is using repetitive imagery in these additional Car Crash and Electric Chair paintings shown below from the "Death and Disaster Series."
Ralph Nader, however, wanted the public to shake off this numbness and make them aware of the fact that these gruesome accidents could be avoided with better automobile safety features. In that sense, Warhol's paintings may not have been good accompaniments to his argument since they were attempts to strip the context of the accident away from the image itself. One of the points of Nadar's book was that car manufacturers were avoiding common sense safety features, such as seat belts, and their general reluctance to spend money on improving safety overall. It may seem hard to believe in this day of seat belt laws that they were not even standard issue in cars until the late 1950's!
It's funny that this all started with a brief conversation with a neighbor; the way he told the story of Nader and Warhol working together sounded so convincing ... I guess it goes to show that one shouldn't believe everything you hear!
