ANDY WARHOL—FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN, THE FIRST MAJOR REEXAMINATION OF WARHOL'S ART IN A GENERATION, 

TO OPEN AT THE WHITNEY ON NOVEMBER 12

While Warhol's Pop images of the 1960s are recognizable world-wide, what remains far less known is the work he produced in the 1970s and 80s. This exhibition positions Warhol's career as a continuum, demonstrating that he didn't slow down after surviving the assassination attempt that nearly took his life in 1968, but entered into a period of intense experimentation, continuing to use the techniques he'd developed early on and expanding upon his previous work. Taking the 1950s and his experience as a commercial illustrator as foundational, and including numerous masterpieces from the 1960s, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again tracks and reappraises the later work of the 1970s and 80s through to Warhol’s untimely death in 1987.

“Perhaps more than any artist before or since, Andy Warhol understood America’s defining twin desires for innovation and conformity, public visibility and absolute privacy,” noted De Salvo. “He transformed these contradictory impulses into a completely original art that, I believe, has profoundly influenced how we see and think about the world now. Warhol produced images that are now so familiar, it’s easy to forget just how unsettling and even shocking they were when they debuted. He pioneered the use of an industrial silkscreen process as a painterly brush to repeat images 'identically', creating seemingly endless variations that call the very value of our cultural icons into question. His repetitions, distortions, camouflaging, incongruous color, and recycling of his own imagery anticipated the most profound effects and issues of our current digital age, when we no longer know which images to trust. From the 1950s until his death, Warhol challenged our fundamental beliefs, particularly our faith in images, even while he sought to believe in those images himself. Looking in this exhibition at the full sweep of his career makes it clear that Warhol was not just a twentieth century titan but a seer of the twenty-first century as well.”

Occupying the entirety of the Whitney’s fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries, the adjacent Kaufman Gallery, the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Lobby Gallery, the Susan and John Hess Family Gallery and Theater, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again will be the largest exhibition devoted to a single artist yet to be presented in the Whitney’s downtown location. Tickets will be available on the Whitney’s website beginning in August.

Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney, commented: “This exhibition takes a fresh focus, while continuing the Whitney’s decades-long engagement with Warhol’s work which we presented in 1971 in a traveling retrospective and in Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s, organized by the Whitney in 1979–80. Few have had the opportunity to see an in-depth presentation of his career, and account for the scale, vibrant color, and material richness of the objects themselves. This exhibition, to be presented in three cities, will allow visitors to experience the work of one of America’s greatest cultural figures firsthand, and to better comprehend Warhol's artistic genius and fearless experimentation.”

“Modern art history is full of trailblazers whose impact dims over time,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “But Warhol is that extremely rare case of an artist whose legacy grows only more potent and lasting. His inescapable example continues to inspire, awe—and even vex—new generations of artists and audiences with each passing year.”

“As a company serving customers and clients across the globe, Bank of America understands how the arts create meaningful connections between people, communities, and cultures. We are proud to be working with the Whitney Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago on this important Warhol retrospective. And, we remain committed to projects like this that are born of our pledge to have a sustainable positive impact on economies and societies around the world,” said Rena M. De Sisto, Global Executive for Arts & Culture, Bank of America.

Through his carefully cultivated persona and willingness to experiment with non-traditional art-making techniques, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) understood the growing power of images in contemporary life and helped to expand the role of the artist in society, making him one of the most distinct and internationally recognized American artists of the twentieth century. This exhibition sets out to prove that there remains far more to Warhol and his work than is commonly known. While the majority of exhibitions, books, articles, and films devoted to Warhol’s art have focused on a single medium, subject, series, or period, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again will employ a chronological and thematic methodology that illuminates the breadth, depth, and interconnectedness of the artist’s production: from his beginnings as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, to his iconic Pop masterpieces of the early 1960s, to the experimental work in film and other mediums from the 1960s and 70s, to his innovative use of readymade abstraction and the painterly sublime in the 1980s. The show’s title is taken from Warhol’s 1975 book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), an aphoristic memoir in which the artist gathered his thoughts on fame, love, beauty, class, money, and other key themes.

Building on a wealth of new materials, research and scholarship that has emerged since the artist’s untimely death in 1987, as well as De Salvo’s own expertise and original research conducted by the Whitney’s curatorial team, the checklist of works has been carefully selected from amongst the thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, films, videos, and photographs that Warhol produced during his lifetime.

EARLY WORK

HAND-PAINTED POP AND PHOTO SILKSCREEN PAINTINGS

Warhol’s engagement with exhibition design and strategies extends throughout the entirety of his career and, in addition to the artist’s celebrity portraits and Death and Disaster paintings, the exhibition will include in-depth presentations of his Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964, and Flowers paintings, 1964-65, that replicate, as much as possible, his highly innovative original installations. In keeping with Warhol’s original installation, forty Flower paintings that have been secured for this exhibition will occupy the entirety of a single gallery, creating an immersive environment. The works will be hung on walls covered in Cow Wallpaper, an element that Warhol exhibited both on its own in his second solo exhibition at Castelli in 1965, and as a backdrop for his paintings, most famously in his 1971 Whitney retrospective.

WARHOL'S FILMS

AFTER 1968

Beginning in 1972, Warhol renewed his studio practice and became increasingly involved with more conventional mediums like painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. Though hardly traditional, most of his subjects of the ensuing decade also conform to the standard genres of portraiture, still life, landscapes, and the nude. The exhibition explores ways in which he developed ideas across the full range of his activities. Along with highlighting Warhol’s cross-media approach, the works will touch on many of the consistent themes of Warhol’s work: sex, death, politics, identity, and the tensions created by the combination of painting and photography. Works will include key examples from the Hammer and Sickle series, the Skulls, and Warhol’s expansive Ladies and Gentleman paintings, a suite of portraits of figures from New York’s transgender community.

PORTRAITS

LATE WORK AND COLLABORATIONS

Tracking Warhol’s consistent responsiveness to current events and culture until the end of his life, the exhibition will focus on two of the most pressing issues to appear in Warhol’s work of the 1980s: the politics of the Cold War and the rapidly escalating AIDS crisis. In 1984, Warhol began a series of hand-painted, mostly black-and-white images of newspaper advertisements and Cold War infographics, similar to those that he made at the start of his career as a fine artist in 1961. However, unlike his early work, the slogans, graphics and imagery that appear in paintings like Repent and Sin No More!, 1985-86, “Are You Different” (negative), 1985-86, and Somebody Wants to Buy Your Apartment Building!, 1985-86, attest to a deep sense of anxiety and dread. The sense of foreboding is compounded when these works are considered alongside Warhol’s contemporaneous paintings of Cold War maps and infographics such as Map of Eastern U.S.S.R. Missile Bases, 1984–85, Map: Soviet Footholds, 1985, and Map: Nicaragua and Honduras, 1984-85.

Warhol served as an important precursor for many artists who came to prominence in the early 1980s, most notably Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. To highlight the reciprocal nature of these influences, the show will include a selection of Warhol’s collaborations with these artists, including Paramount, 1984-85, an important painting made by Warhol and Basquiat that complements both artists’ work from this period, and uniquely illustrates their shared sensibilities. Also to be shown will be one of Warhol’s final works, Camouflage Last Supper. The Last Supper paintings were initially commissioned to hang across the street from the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan while da Vinci’s original mural was undergoing conservation. Though it was not part of this original commission, Camouflage Last Supper is exemplary of the series and provides a profound culmination to many of the major themes of this exhibition: authorship and historicity, abstraction and figuration, immediacy and mediation, spirituality, and the sublime.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

In 1968 Warhol was shot in a near-fatal assassination attempt, but by 1969 he had founded Interview magazine and his interest was reignited in producing work across all media, including sculpture, video, and performance. In 1975 Warhol published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), and by the late 1970s had expanded his practice to cable television shows with Andy Warhol’s Fashion, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, and Andy Warhol’s T.V. Warhol’s work of the late 1970s and 1980s exhibits an increased interest in abstraction and collaboration, and often reflexively returns to his own earlier work and iconography. The late work speaks to his voracious interest in current events, and his enthusiasm for young artists from the East Village scene such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom he collaborated.

In February 1987 Warhol died after a brief illness following routine gallbladder surgery. The Andy Warhol Diaries, his infamous account of his own life from the mid-1970s up to his death, was published posthumously in 1991. Major exhibitions during Warhol’s lifetime include his first institutional solo exhibition at the ICA Philadelphia in 1965, a 1968 exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, a 1970 retrospective organized by the Pasadena Art Museum which traveled extensively, including to the Whitney in 1971, and Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s organized by the Whitney in 1979-80. The final exhibition of his work during his lifetime, at Robert Miller Gallery, New York, in January 1987, debuted a new series of stitched photographs. Warhol’s work is collected by significant institutions across the globe, including major repositories at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum Brandhorst, Munich; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Marx Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.

ABOUT DONNA DE SALVO

De Salvo was instrumental in the design of the Whitney’s new building, and led the curatorial team for the museum’s inaugural presentation, America Is Hard to See (2015). Recent exhibitions she has curated or co-curated include: Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (2017), Open Plan: Michael Heizer (2016), and Open Plan: Steve McQueen (2016). Previous Whitney exhibitions include Full House: The Whitney's Collection at 75 (2006) and Robert Irwin: Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) (2013). Prior to working at the Whitney, De Salvo served for five years as a Senior Curator at Tate Modern, London, where she curated such exhibitions as Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 (2005); Marsyas (Anish Kapoor’s 2003 work commissioned by Tate Modern for its Turbine Hall); and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2001).

INSTITUTIONAL AND CURATORIAL CREDITS

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