ARTISTS
Andy Warhol Portfolios: A Life in Pop
Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called “art,” or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. — Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (American, 1928 – 1987) Filmmaker, photographer, painter, commercial illustrator, music producer, writer and even fashion model—Warhol was a true radical in his approach to art. The breadth and significance of his influence has made him one of the most important artists of our time. He challenged traditional boundaries of art practice, blurring the lines between art, business and life. He turned everyday life into art and art into a way to live the everyday, collecting, documenting, reproducing, experimenting and collaborating with the people, places and things around him. Warhol’s enthusiasm for life was rivaled only by his love for the methods of capturing it. He loved the framing device—the camera, the silkscreen, the empty box, the tape recorder, the shopping bag, the telephone—as much as the content it framed. Perhaps Warhol’s greatest innovation was that he saw no limits to his practice. His pop sensibility embraced an anything-can-be-art approach, appropriating images, ideas and even innovation itself.
This installation features selections from Andy Warhol’s forty-year span of work in the art of photographic silkscreen printmaking. While many of the works were made in the 1970s and 1980s, their subject matter—iconic people, trends and issues—reflects Warhol’s decades-long process of mirroring popular American culture. Warhol transforms photographic imagery, from the rather mundane still lifes of fruits to portraits of comic characters and endangered species, through color, design, form and multiples. Due to the infinite possibilities of printmaking, Warhol’s portfolios contain a vast array of techniques, ranging from collage and drawing to the use of diamond dust and color variation.
Warhol was extremely interested in color, and his personal library contained many books on the great modern colorists, including Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Josef Albers. Warhol mixed colors, but he also used them straight. In the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create the print portfolios Sunset, Grapes, Space Fruit: Still Lifes, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Myths, Endangered Species and others. The color choices in these series were very important to the artist. For the Sunset series, Warhol originally created 632 prints of the Sun, each with a different combination of colors. In the Myths and Grapes series, Warhol used a glittery substance called diamond dust to draw attention to the surface and to create changes in the colors of the prints. In the Endangered Species series, he used bright and complementary combinations of colors to draw attention to the animals and their plight.
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Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called “art,” or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. — Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (American, 1928 – 1987) Filmmaker, photographer, painter, commercial illustrator, music producer, writer and even fashion model—Warhol was a true radical in his approach to art. The breadth and significance of his influence has made him one of the most important artists of our time. He challenged traditional boundaries of art practice, blurring the lines between art, business and life. He turned everyday life into art and art into a way to live the everyday, collecting, documenting, reproducing, experimenting and collaborating with the people, places and things around him. Warhol’s enthusiasm for life was rivaled only by his love for the methods of capturing it. He loved the framing device—the camera, the silkscreen, the empty box, the tape recorder, the shopping bag, the telephone—as much as the content it framed. Perhaps Warhol’s greatest innovation was that he saw no limits to his practice. His pop sensibility embraced an anything-can-be-art approach, appropriating images, ideas and even innovation itself.
This installation features selections from Andy Warhol’s forty-year span of work in the art of photographic silkscreen printmaking. While many of the works were made in the 1970s and 1980s, their subject matter—iconic people, trends and issues—reflects Warhol’s decades-long process of mirroring popular American culture. Warhol transforms photographic imagery, from the rather mundane still lifes of fruits to portraits of comic characters and endangered species, through color, design, form and multiples. Due to the infinite possibilities of printmaking, Warhol’s portfolios contain a vast array of techniques, ranging from collage and drawing to the use of diamond dust and color variation.
Warhol was extremely interested in color, and his personal library contained many books on the great modern colorists, including Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Josef Albers. Warhol mixed colors, but he also used them straight. In the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create the print portfolios Sunset, Grapes, Space Fruit: Still Lifes, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Myths, Endangered Species and others. The color choices in these series were very important to the artist. For the Sunset series, Warhol originally created 632 prints of the Sun, each with a different combination of colors. In the Myths and Grapes series, Warhol used a glittery substance called diamond dust to draw attention to the surface and to create changes in the colors of the prints. In the Endangered Species series, he used bright and complementary combinations of colors to draw attention to the animals and their plight.
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