Displaying items by tag: pop art

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.

Ileana Sonnabend was one of the greatest and most influential discoverers of artistic talent of the late 20^th century, known and appreciated for her intuition, strength of character, ground-breaking vision and for that eclecticism of taste and thinking that enabled her to understand and promote all that was new in American and European art. Created over many years and a material reflection of her commitment to supporting young artists and the avant-garde movements of the 20^th century, her extraordinary collection now finds a “European home” in the splendid monumental rooms on the second floor of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna at Ca’ Pesaro.

The exhibition marks the first step in a long-term collaboration with the Sonnabend Collection and Sonnabend Collection Foundation, and offers an extraordinary opportunity to enrich the city’s 20^th-century art collections and the permanent displays at Ca’ Pesaro, which thanks to the works from the Ileana Sonnabend collection, will be able to offer its visitors a more comprehensive itinerary with plenty of masterpieces from the history of art of the whole of the 20^th century. The Sonnabend Collection picks up exactly at the point in which Ca’ Pesaro ended its collecting spree and relationship with the Biennale, and will lead the visitor past a series of works of the highest artistic quality forming part of the principal experimental schools of the late 20^th century through over 70 iconic works of the period.

The Arizona State University Art Museum announced that it is the recipient of six new works by artist Andy Warhol, a gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. These original Warhol screenprints will be on view in the lobby of the ASU Art Museum at Mill Avenue and 10th Street in Tempe this summer, beginning May 27.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established after Warhol’s death in 1987, and in accordance with Warhol’s will, it has given prints to many institutions across the country to ensure “that the many facets of Warhol’s complex oeuvre are both widely accessible and properly cared for.” In 2008, the ASU Art Museum received 155 photographs by Andy Warhol from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, which donated over 28,500 photographs to educational institutions across the United States.

The University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has received a gift of six original never-before-exhibited Andy Warhol prints from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

All with Warhol’s recognizable style and focus, the prints represent a period of the artist’s work from the late 1970s to mid-1980s, not long before the Warhol’s death in 1987 at the age of 58. The prints depict a range of subjects, from fashionable portraits to popular culture, and include such iconic images as Warhol’s portrait of friend and fellow artist Joseph Beuys and his striking representation of Lakota chief Sitting Bull.

Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum is kicking off its year-long 20th anniversary celebration with a multimedia exhibition titled “Halston and Warhol: Silver and Suede.” The show examines the interconnected lives and creative practices of the iconic Pop artist, Andy Warhol, and Halston, a popular American fashion designer.

Warhol and Halston met in the early 1960s, but nearly a decade elapsed before the pair became friends. The duo went on to develop a creative dialogue that would last until Warhol’s death in 1987. Halston, an avid collector of Warhol’s art, was one of the Pop artist’s favorite subjects. Warhol even devoted an entire chapter of his book, “Exposures,” to Halston, who he deemed the “first all-American fashion designer.”

Art collecting has always been an international affair. Works made in one place are often sought after by people living in another.

Many of the greatest American Pop artworks of the 1960s are in German collections. French Impressionism from the end of the 19th century is superbly represented in the United States.

And going back hundreds of years, collections in Japan began to swell with paintings made across the sea in China. A magnificent show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art chronicles the phenomenon.

"Chinese Paintings From Japanese Collections" is something of a coup. It features 35 scrolls, some consisting of multiple panels, from the Tokyo National Museum and other collections in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. Japanese museums are often reluctant to allow important works to leave the country, even for temporary exhibitions. But LACMA curator Stephen Little has managed a remarkable group of loans — including some that are just now making their premiere abroad.

On Wednesday, May 14, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York garnered $364 million, falling well within the auction’s pre-sale estimate of $337 million to $474 million. Of the 79 lots offered, 12 failed to find buyers. While the auction fell short of Christie’s monumental $475 million sale, which took place the evening before, new records were set for twelve artists at Sotheby’s, including Julian Schnabel, Wade Guyton, Rosemarie Trockel, Dan Flavin, Matthew Barney, and Keith Haring.

The top lot of the night was Andy Warhol’s “Six Self-Portraits,” which had resided in a private collection since its creation in 1986. The portraits, which are among the last works created by the pioneering Pop artist, sold for $30.1 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million). The Warhol works were trailed by Gerhard Richter’s oil-on-canvas painting “Blaud” (1988), which sold to a telephone bidder for $28.7 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million) and Jeff Koons’ mirror polished stainless steel sculpture with transparent color coating titled “Popeye” (1988), which fetched $28.2 million (estimate on request). The 6 ½-foot tall sculpture was purchased by billionaire casino tycoon and art collector Steve Wynn, who plans to display the work in his Las Vegas casino.

A line of people snaked along the walkway to the Chrysler Museum of Art on Friday evening.

"It's exciting," said Kathie Moore of Norfolk. She was among those in line for a members preview event. She hadn't been inside yet, but she already appreciated the new landscaping and outdoor sculptures.

"I've missed it terribly," she said.

The Chrysler Museum of Art reopens today to the public after being closed for just over 16 months during a $24 million expansion and renovation project.

Friday evening, more than a thousand members, out of about 3,000, flooded the museum for a reopening party.

The highly-anticipated contemporary art fair Frieze New York is currently underway on Randall’s Island in Manhattan. A spin-off of Frieze London, which launched in 2003, Frieze New York includes a full roster of workshops, lectures, and satellite fairs. Now in its third year, Frieze New York features over 190 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries, with 53 participants from the fair’s host city.

A vibrant mix of established and emerging dealers, Frieze allots two sections, Focus and Frame, to rising galleries. Focus galleries are less than ten years old and exhibit curated projects conceived specifically for Frieze New York. The Frame section, which is dedicated to galleries established less than six years ago, presents solo shows and is overseen by Berlin-based curator and art writer, Raphael Gygax, and Tim Saltarelli, who is a New York-based curator and writer. Industry heavyweights, including David Zwirner Gallery, Gagosian Gallery, and Thaddaeus Ropac, are exhibiting works by minimalist Donald Judd, Pop artist Ed Ruscha, and German painter Georg Baselitz, respectively.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is working with the Park Hyatt luxury brand on a collaboration that will mutually benefit guests and members of both global organizations. The collaboration coincides with MoMA’s Sigmar Polke retrospective, “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010,” which was sponsored by Park Hyatt.

The Hyatt recently purchased “Siberian Meteorites,” an original work by the postwar German artist and it will be displayed at Park Hyatt Chicago later this year. The work will eventually replace Robert Rauschenberg’s “Tropicana/Channel,” which currently hangs in the hotel’s lobby. The Rauschenberg work is on loan from Hyatt’s Executive Chairman Tom Pritzker.