< back
Press Release: February 28, 2008 Press Contacts: Anne Scher/Alex Wittenberg The Jewish Museum 212.423.3271 pressoffice@thejm.org
ART, IMAGE AND WARHOL CONNECTIONS OPENS AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM ON MARCH 16 NEW YORK, NY – The Jewish Museum will present Art, Image and Warhol Connections from March 16 through August 3, 2008. In this mini-exhibition, works by seven artists who directly respond to Andy Warhol or employ techniques often associated with Warhol’s oeuvre will be on view in the contemporary gallery of the Museum’s permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey. Warhol and themes central to his practice – such as current events, consumer culture and the superstar – are seen reflected through 26 works by a multi-generational group of artists, including Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Abshalom Jac Lahav, Adam Rolston, Ben Shahn, Devorah Sperber and June Wayne. In the 1960s and 1970s, Shahn, Wayne and Katz developed new ways to portray the public personas of private individuals. In the 1990s, artists such as Kass, Rolston and Sperber cast a critical yet admiring eye on Warhol to address his omissions and limitations. Emerging painter Abshalom Jac Lahav elaborates and subsumes subjects of Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century in his own ongoing portraiture project. Directly or indirectly, these artists extend and transform Warhol’s legacy. Art, Image and Warhol Connections is on view concurrently with the exhibition Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered. The murders of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner during the Freedom Summer of 1964 prompted an international surge of support for the Civil Rights Movement. Ben Shahn created in a set of screen prints in 1965, basing his works on photographs of the three civil rights workers as shown in the FBI poster circulated after their disappearance. Like Shahn, Warhol repeatedly incorporated photographs into his work and in 1963 he created a series of paintings entitled Race Riots that captured the upheaval in America in the 1960s. In his Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Warhol frames the profiles of his subjects with bold, fragmented lines evoking Shahn’s drawing style. Alex Katz’s lithograph Portrait of a Poet (1970) is a near replica of his 1967 oil painting. For the print, Katz cropped the image just below the chin, centering the nose. The severe geometry of the face and harsh lighting on the glasses recall the stark outlines of Katz’s cut-out painted steel sculptures. With Portrait of a Poet, Katz dispensed with context and rendered the picture akin to Warhol’s coolly measured Screen Test films. The slight upward tilt of the head suggests the esteem Katz held for poet and playwright Kenneth Koch, a frequent creative partner in the 1960s. June Wayne founded the nonprofit Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1960, helping to revive the professional production of artist prints in the United States. Based in Los Angeles, Wayne’s workshop was a continent away from Warhol’s Factory in New York. The Dorothy Series consists of twenty lithographs in a visual narrative charting the major events in the life of Wayne’s mother, Dorothy Kline, an immigrant, divorcée, feminist, and garment salesperson. Documents—photographs, tax returns, letters, and so on—are layered against striking colors. Wayne, like Warhol, exploits modern advertising styles to rejuvenate the imagery of daily life. Two 1981 lithographs from the series will be on view. Deborah Kass examines the tensions among popular culture, fine art, and identity. In her Warhol Project (1992–2000), Kass appropriated Warhol’s techniques, colors, and compositions. Six Blue Barbras (1992) retroactively introduces Barbra Streisand to the pantheon of female celebrities portrayed by Warhol in the early 1960s. The project concluded with the ironic self-portrait Red Deb (2000) that re-created the Liz Taylor of Warhol’s 1963 painting in Kass’s own image. The works displace the art of a male predecessor into feminist narrative. Adam Rolston’s untitled 1993 painting of a matzoh box directly responds to Andy Warhol’s imagery of Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans. As both homage and critique of Warhol, Rolston glamorizes the Horowitz Margarten brand and elevates it to art. The artist’s hand is clearly seen in Rolston’s painterly brushwork which differs from the silk-screening process preferred by Warhol. Portraiture becomes visual interpretation and argument in Abshalom Jac Lahav’s open-ended project, 48 Jews (2007), examining the representation of Jews in the Diaspora. Using a playful wit and critical acumen, Lahav gathers images from the Internet and other media sources and selects them for their iconic quality. The uniform size, composition, and subject of the paintings in 48 Jews suggest a canon, Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980). Lahav, however, continually repaints, adds, and discards individuals, preventing closure or completeness. The individuality of each subject is affirmed with Lahav’s stylistic inconsistency, challenging their status as members of a coherent group and engaging the debate over the facts and myths of Jewish identity. A selection of 16 paintings by Lahav will be on view, depicting Hannah Arendt, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Niels Bohr, Marc Chagall, Noam Chomsky, Bob Dylan, Anne Frank, Alan Greenspan, Harry Houdini, Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Monica Lewinsky, Elvis Presley, Marcel Proust, Slash, and Gertrude Stein. When asked why he was interested in painting Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol replied, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch everyday, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” Artist Devorah Sperber re-creates Warhol’s iconic image in her elaborate thread installation After Warhol (2008). Nearly 700 spools of thread create the pixilated, deconstructed image that becomes clear to viewers once they look through the viewing sphere placed in front of the piece. Her renditions of familiar paintings suggest the ways in which the brain recognizes and processes visual information. Art, Image and Warhol Connections was organized by Daniel Belasco, Henry J. Leir Assistant Curator of The Jewish Museum, and Joanna Montoya, Curatorial Program Coordinator. The exhibition is made possible by the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art. About The Jewish Museum The Jewish Museum was established on January 20, 1904 when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection. Today, The Jewish Museum maintains an important collection of 26,000 objects – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media. Widely admired for its exhibitions and educational programs that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is the preeminent institution exploring the intersection of 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture. General Information Museum hours are Saturday through Wednesday, 11am to 5:45pm; and Thursday, 11am to 8pm. Museum admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is free on Saturdays. For general information on The Jewish Museum, the public may visit the Museum’s Web site at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212.423.3200. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan. # # #
FAQS|Contact Us|E-news Sign-up|Press Room|Provenance Research Project|Site Map|About This Site Site Map|Terms of Use|Confidentiality Policy|Credits|Copyright @ 2003 The Jewish Museum