Warhol’s Wide World at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Mar 18 2009
until Jul 13 2009
“All my portraits have to be the same size, so they’ll all fit together and make one big painting called Portraits of Society. That’s a good idea, isn’t it? Maybe the Metropolitan Museum would want it someday.” Andy Warhol One hundred and thirty works selected from the thousand or so portraits that he painted from the early 1960s onwards are arranged by theme, focusing on the key points in Warhol’s work: Self Portraits, Screen Tests, Mao, Dollars, Disasters, The Last Supper…, which situate them in a retrospective view of his production. In 1979, the Whitney Museum exhibited about fifty of these paintings, but since then – despite the fact that many of them have become “icons” – they have not been the subject of a major show. With the aim of recreating the repetitive effect that Warhol had in mind when he painted them, the RMN is presenting, for the first time, this large set of paintings which constitutes an unprecedented archive in the history of painting and photography. In 1962, Andy Warhol painted the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and her rival Liz Taylor and reinterpreted the Mona Lisa and Elvis Presley. From 1967 until his death in 1987, he produced commissioned portraits of dozens of personalities, famous or obscure, holding a vertiginous, flattering mirror to a world fascinated by appearances. He revived a neglected genre, applying new codes which deeply marked the history of portraiture. Alongside film and rock stars (Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Mick Jagger, Sylvester Stallone), we find portraits of artists (Man Ray, David Hockney, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring), collectors and art dealers (Dominique de Menil, Bruno Bischofberger, IleanaSonnabend, Leo Castelli), politicians (Willy Brandt, Edward Kennedy), fashion designers (Yves Saint-Laurent, Sonia Rykiel, Hélène Rochas), businessmen and jetsetters (Gianni Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, Princess of Monaco, Gunther Sachs). Famous or no so famous, they all glow with the aura of Warhol’s genius. In this series, Warhol painted a picture of an entire society and invented a new form of artistic production – serial and almost mass produced. In his studio, “The Factory”, Andy Warhol developed a systematic process in the early 1970s: he made up his models and photographed them with a Big Shot Polaroid (the Warhol Museum inPittsburgh has hundreds of these photos, some of which will be presented in the exhibition). He carefully selected the shots, then painted and silk screened the portraits. OPENING HOURS: Wed –Sun: 10.00 – 22.00, Thur: 10.00 – 20.00 Image Credits: Slide Show 1: Ethel Scull 36 times, 1963, 202,6 x 363,2 cm acrylique, peinture métalisée et encre sérigraphique sur toile Whitney Museum of American Art / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, © Whitney Museum of American Art / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, © 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009 Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, Collection particulière, (c) 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009 Triple Elvis, 1963, 208,3 x 175,3 cm, Encre sérigraphique et peinture argentée sur toile, Collection particulière, © 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009 Slide Show 2: Brigitte Bardot, 1974, 2 panneaux, 120 x 120 cm chaque, Acrylique et encre sérigraphique sur toile Collection particulière , © 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009 Jackie, Andy Warhol, Collection particulière, (c) 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009 Autoportrait, 1986, 35,6 x 35,6 cm, Acrylique et encre sérigraphique sur toile The Andy warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, © 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009  |
