Andy Warhol’s art is inseparable from photography. One of the pioneers of the Pop art movement of the 1960s, Warhol turned to photographic images from advertising and journalism as the starting-point for his celebrated silkscreen paintings. His own photographs captured the faces of the rich and famous, the glittering New York disco scene, and glimpses of his world travels. The camera was his constant companion, serving as a combination sketchbook and diary. An obsessive photographer, Warhol made between 60,000 and 100,000 snapshots and Polaroids in his lifetime.

Among the over 300 works on view will be photographs that Warhol used as source material for his paintings, examples of his photobooth and Polaroid portraits, and his stitched photographs. To highlight the intimate relationship between photography and Warhol’s work in other media, the exhibition will present over 20 paintings, prints and films. There will be continuous video projections of the early Warhol films Sleep and Kiss, as well as his Screen Tests of the 1960s, which feature such personalities as Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Susan Sontag.

Also on display will be the contents of one of Warhol’s early Time Capsules, the boxes in which he archived the widely assorted visual materials he gathered in his daily rounds. In addition, an extensive selection of photographs by figures such as Richard Avedon, Stephen Shore, Robert Mapplethorpe and Christopher Makos will document the activities at Warhol’s famous studio, the Factory.

Andy Warhol: Photography provides an unprecedented opportunity to examine Warhol’s enormously influential mixture of photography, mass media and fine art. The exhibition will allow visitors to examine the links between still photography and Warhol’s early films, and to consider the ambiguous play of identity and performance in Warhol’s portraits.

ANDY WARHOL

Born Andrew Warhola in 1928, Andy Warhol grew up and was educated in Pittsburgh, where he attended the Carnegie Institute for Technology as a painting and design major. Warhol began his career as a commercial artist after moving to New York in 1949. He achieved early success as a commercial illustrator and designer whose assignments ranged from advertising graphics to devising window displays for department stores. In the early 1960s, Warhol won international attention as one of the founders of the Pop art movement, which championed the use of pop-culture imagery and mass-produced objects as artistic subject matter. An inveterate experimenter, Warhol in 1963 began to produce independent films using the actors, artists and scene-makers who frequented his studio, the Factory. This location became a key meeting point for avant-garde artists and pop-culture icons in the 1960s. An inescapable presence on the New York nightlife circuit, Warhol in 1969 founded the magazine Interview, in which many of his photographs of personalities and club events appeared. Warhol died in 1987 following complications from surgery.

WARHOL AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography was central to Andy Warhol’s art. Early in his career as a professional commercial artist, Warhol realized that the camera was usurping the role of hand-drawn illustration. In fact, he regularly used photographs drawn from the mass media as source material for his commercial assignments. This practice carried over into his art, and from the early 1960s onward Warhol almost completely abandoned the brush and pen in favor of the photo-silkscreen technique.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol began using press and publicity photographs as the basis for some of his most enduring silkscreen paintings. Most of these source photographs were collected by Warhol himself from magazines, tabloid newspapers and photographic archives, with particular emphasis on such categories as celebrities, crime, sports, space, accidents and suicides. For his screenprint Electric Chair (1971), from the "Death in America" series, Warhol combed through the photo archives of the New York Public Library to find an image of the electric chair used to execute alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Warhol employed the same process of appropriating and transforming images from popular culture to create his celebrated silkscreen portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe. He also used photobooth portrait strips in making silkscreen paintings, and regularly transformed his Polaroids and individual frames from his short films into paintings and prints. His own 35mm photographs served as the basis for a 1980s series of stitched photographs that feature multiple prints of a single image sewn together in a grid.

CATALOGUE

The exhibition is accompanied by a 400-page catalogue, Andy Warhol Photography (Edition Stemmle, 1999). It features 110 color and 300 duotone illustrations, as well as eight historical and interpretive essays.

TOUR INFORMATION

Andy Warhol: Photography was organized by the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Germany, in association with The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York. The exhibition premiered in 1999 at the Hamburg Kunsthalle and traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in winter 2000; the ICP presentation will be the third and final venue. The exhibition was curated by Christoph Heinrich, curator of contemporary art at the Hamburg Kunsthalle; the New York showing was coordinated by ICP curatorial assistant Vanessa Rocco. The exhibition design at ICP was created by Julie Ault and Martin Beck.