Enjoy this current show at Skarstedt Gallery, Paris: Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, The exhibition delves into the myriad influences art history had on Warhol’s oeuvre. It traces his art historical appropriations throughout the 1970s and 1980s, featuring seminal examples of works from series such as Heads (After Picasso), The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, After de Chirico, and The Scream (After Edvard Munch).

By holistically examining Warhol’s dialogues with art history, Who is Who? offers new insight into Warhol’s interests: his relationship to icons, both religious and secular; his collapsing of the boundaries between high and low; his interest in mass reproduction; and his perceived place within this grand lineage.

Warhol’s reinterpretations of iconic works simultaneously elevated their status even further while embedding himself into that place of prominence. As Germano Celant observes, “But the history of art is itself a concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too in the magma of his imagination…he turned [these artists] into dead flowers, so that the absolute subjectivity of art became once again a problem of media communication: a reproduction, cut and edited, with unnatural, technological colors.”

In using the art of others to speak to contemporary themes, Warhol likewise placed himself within the history of artists appropriating other artists, a theme which began with the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and continues today in artists such as Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman. 

No discussion of art historical lineage would be complete without an ode to Leonardo da Vinci, and no subject would better serve Warhol’s own interests in the iconic than the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was indeed one of Warhol’s earliest subjects, begun in 1963 following the painting’s celebrated visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was a sensation—a celebrity in its own right, not unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom he was also painting at the time.

Warhol returned to the icon again in the 1970s in a suite of paintings that includes Mona Lisa Four Times (1973), a nuanced painting that not only exhibits his continued fascination with the subject, but highlights his more painterly experiments of the 1970s, its deep tones of black and brown anticipating the Reversals he would make at the end of the decade. 

More on this show in our video on the occasion of Art Basel Paris 2024
Link to video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJjeAPF3v5k

BLACKQUBE YOUTOUBE CHANNEL
Link to channel
https://www.youtube.com/@blackqubemagazine

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