Displaying items by tag: Andy Warhol

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s iconic “Empire,” the experimental film will be shown continuously in the Fifth Avenue lobby of New York City’s Empire State Building. The screening, which will take place throughout the month of July, will be complemented by images of Warhol’s art and details of his life and filmmaking.

“Empire” is a silent black-and-white film that consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building. Filming began on the night of July 25-26, 1964, from 8:10pm to 2:30am from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building in the Rockefeller Foundation office. Punctuated by the Empire State Building’s changing lights and the sky above, “Empire” is hailed as an avant-garde masterpiece, challenging viewers with its daunting running time, yet raising profound questions about time, subject, and personal reflection. When explaining the film, Warhol said, “I never liked the idea of picking out certain scenes and pieces of time and putting them together, because...it’s not like life...what I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment.”

Even an art novice would recognize the names of such masters as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

This summer, they’ll get a chance to see some of the best works of art of these masters and more assembled in one exhibit at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

"Sincerely Yours: Treasures of the Queen City" opens Saturday with a free community event and runs through mid-September. It offers visitors a rare opportunity to see 70 master works from such famed painters as van Gogh, Picasso and Warhol along with Giacomo Balla, Salvador Dali, Paul Gauguin, Frida Kahlo, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko - all of them part of the Albright-Knox permanent collection.

A self-portrait of Andy Warhol in a spiky fright wig sold for 2.9 million pounds ($4.98 million) at Phillips yesterday in London, concluding the spring auction season in Europe.

This week’s evening sales of contemporary art at Phillips, Sotheby’s (BID) and Christie’s in the U.K. capital produced a total of 202.4 million pounds, a 28 percent jump from the tally at equivalent events last year. New buyers from China and other international markets are boosting prices for top postwar and contemporary artists, as the works are being increasingly seen as strong investments.

The National Gallery of Victoria recently announced a major donation of artworks by the daughters of the late Melbourne philanthropist Loti Smorgon who died in 2013 at the age of 94. Mrs Smorgon was predeceased by her husband, Victor, who passed in 2009 aged 96.

The decision to donate the works was made by Mrs Smorgon’s daughters, Ginny, Vicki, Bindy, and the family of the late Sandra. It consists of Andy Warhol’s “Portrait of Loti” 1981, Renoir’s “Jeune femme assise décolleté” 1891, Jeffrey Smart’s “Winter carnival, Viareggio” 1988, and Henry Moore’s sculpture “Reclining figure distorted” 1979-80 along with the related prepatory work “Reclining figure distorted – Sectional line” 1979.

The banana. The zipper.

Along with his Marilyn Monroe portrait and the Campbell Soup cans, Andy Warhol’s album covers have their own place in the pop-art pantheon.

The Cranbrook Art Museum is kicking off what it says is the most comprehensive exhibition of authenticated Warhol record covers to date — including three recently discovered albums that never before have been shown in such a setting.

“Warhol On Vinyl: The Record Covers, 1949-1987+,” which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through March 15, features 60 unique album covers and nearly 100 in all, including color and size variations.

The biggest museum fundraising campaign in San Francisco history is nearing its $610 million goal two years before the opening of a new wing that will more than double the space for artworks by Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and David Hockney.

About $570 million, or 94 percent, has been raised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its 235,000-square-foot (21,800-square-meter) expansion and to add $245 million to the museum’s endowment. The $305 million wing designed by the Snohetta architecture firm is rising behind SFMOMA’s current home, opened two decades ago in the technology-heavy South of Market area, or SOMA.

Art Basel, one of the world’s top modern and contemporary art fairs, opened on Tuesday, June 17, with a private preview that saw a number of impressive sales. Described as the “Olympics of the art world,” this year’s show features approximately 300 galleries from across the globe exhibiting the work of more than 4,000 artists, ranging from Modern masters to emerging contemporary artists.  

Welcoming an elite group of collectors, the opening night preview proved that the market for modern and contemporary art shows no signs of slowing down. Andy Warhol’s “Self-Portrait (Fright Wig)” (1986), which was being offered by London’s Skarstedt Gallery and carried an asking price of $32 million, was the most expensive work sold during the fair’s opening day. The silkscreen was snapped up by an American collector during the first 15 minutes of the event.

Fifty years ago, during the summer of 1964, Andy Warhol began working on silkscreen paintings of flowers, a subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. When Warhol had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November 1964 it consisted entirely of Flowers. Best known for his vibrant pop imagery and searing commentary on art and popular culture, Warhol’s flower imagery reveals a softer, more intimate side of the artist. In retrospect, it is also a provocative series, appropriating a powerful symbol later identified with flower-power counterculture of the 1960s, the age of peace, love, and anti-war protest. The Flowers are the only subject that Warhol revisited throughout his entire career and in almost every medium. The artist’s floral imagery is among the quietest, most beautiful, and least studied. The Cheekwood exhibition is a rare occasion when Warhol’s artificial flower images meet the floral abundance of an actual garden. 

This exhibition traces Warhol’s engagement with floral images throughout his career, beginning with a group of his earliest commercial illustrations, drawn in the 1950s, and his creation of the Flowers series in 1964, to photographs, paintings, and screen prints through 1986 before his untimely death the following year. The development of Warhol’s career can be seen in the progression from the delicacy of the early illustrations to the boldness of the 1964 series to the tension between the beauty and banality of the photographs and prints late in his career.

Isabelle Collin Dufresne, the French-born artist, actress and author known as Ultra Violet, the beauty among the superstars of Andy Warhol’s glory days at his studio, the Factory, died early Saturday morning at a Manhattan hospital. She was 78 and lived in Manhattan and in Nice, France.

The death was confirmed by William Butler, a family friend. A cousin, Carole Thouvard Revol, said the cause was cancer.

Whitney Museum of American Art Director Adam Weinberg spoke with The Chronicle while visiting the Bay Area for the opening of "Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection," a major show at the San Jose Museum of Art of contemporary works on loan from the New York museum.

Like the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection sampled in "Modernism from the National Gallery of Art" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Landau Collection includes works by many names considered safe, if not already canonical: Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin.