'If only we all took selfies like Warhol' – Andy Warhol/Eduardo Paolozzi review

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
From his lipsticked selfies to his troubling first world war work, Warhol shows there’s no end to his genius. Poor Paolozzi just can’t keep up

In 1963, just as pop art was getting famous, Andy Warhol, its coolest exponent, told an interviewer he painted the way he did because: “I want to be a machine.” It was a great line – and it makes a provocative title for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s stimulating juxtaposition of his work with that of the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. If it had any truth, Warhol failed in his ambition: there is nothing remotely machine-like about his art. Emotion and desire beat through it as insistently as Lou Reed’s staccato rhythm guitar in I’m Waiting for the Man, by the Velvet Underground, the house band at Warhol’s studio.

One of the early drawings in this exhibition anticipates that song about addiction. Entitled The Nation’s Nightmare, it depicts a young man injecting heroin. Warhol drew it in 1951 to advertise a radio documentary series about America’s “social problems”. Yet it is in no way a hack job. There’s a sensuous compassion in his portrait of the youth, an empathy intensified by Warhol’s adoring delineation of his beautiful face. For years, biographers wrote about Warhol’s career as a commercial artist in New York in the 1950s as, at best, a preliminary to his real art. At worst, it was proof of his true nature as a commercial sellout. The superb selection of his 50s drawings makes that cynical view of him seem plain stupid.

Related: Pop's dark star: the return of Andy Warhol

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