Following its successful run at our Paris gallery, Skarstedt is pleased to announce that Andy Warhol: Who is Who?—an exhibition that delves into the myriad influences art history had on Warhol’s oeuvre—will open at our Upper East Side location in New York this winter with an updated checklist. This exhibition traces Warhol’s 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 Details of Renaissance Paintings. 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. Both legs of the exhibition will be accompanied by a publication authored by Bernard Blistène.
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 Four Mona Lisas (1978), 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.
Warhol’s religious background, which has only recently become a more prominent focal point in scholarship on the artist, is most directly acknowledged by Warhol himself in his works derived from Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Four examples of The Last Supper will appear alongside Four Mona Lisas, illustrating the many iterations of one of Warhol’s most prolific themes. In exhibiting these remarkably different examples from this series side-by-side, the viewer can glimpse the ways this particular image fuelled Warhol’s numerous interests. The smaller, hand-drawn example not only exhibits Warhol’s newfound penchant for tracing silkscreened images onto his canvases—a practice he began around the time he started working with Jean-Michel Basquiat—but it provides a quietly tender, contemplative tone, a revelation of his own faith, and a rather vulnerable admission of his feelings in a chaotic and tragic 1980s. Meanwhile, the double silkscreened versions of The Last Supper make plain the notions of celebrity as culture that generated Warhol’s entire oeuvre, while the version silkscreened in Detail of the Last Supper / Be a Somebody with a Body (1985-1986) merges these ideas with his lifelong concerns over the human body and the pursuit of beauty. This series serves as a prelude to the artist’s own untimely death, encapsulating his fears and the collective grief of his community at that time, while revealing his secret faith. Using a copy of a copy of the original fresco, his choice of source echoes earlier works that explored how mass reproduction can alter our perception and emotional response to images, taking all that is perceived as good and holy within Christ and subverting him to illustrate all of the profane and horrible truths of the world.
Similarly, Warhol’s Details of Renaissance Paintings series, including Details of Renaissance Paintings (Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation, 1472) alongside painted and editioned versions of Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482) and (all 1984), reflects his fascination with the interplay between art history and popular culture. By isolating specific sections of these revered masterpieces, Warhol disrupts their original context and transforms them into commodities of contemporary visual culture. His cropped version of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—seen in two iterations in this exhibition—notably reduces the grandeur of the composition to a close-up of the goddess’s face, positioning her within the visual lexicon of Warhol’s 1960s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. This reframing not only underscores Warhol’s interest in the commodification of beauty and fame but also suggests a deliberate blurring of boundaries between classical and contemporary icons. The inclusion of The Annunciation further reinforces his ongoing engagement with themes of divinity and celebrity, as the cropping of the image places greater emphasis on the landscape rather than the sacred encounter between the angel and the Virgin. By shifting focus away from the central religious narrative, Warhol satirically undermines the painting’s original spiritual significance, transforming it into an aesthetic object rather than a theological statement. In both cases, Warhol's appropriations assert his place within the grand tradition of artists reinterpreting their predecessors, while simultaneously questioning the role of high art in a media-saturated society.
Warhol’s pull towards the mystical and sacred extends even to his secular art historical appropriations, as seen in The Two Sisters (After de Chirico) and The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) (both 1982). Using de Chirico’s multiple iterations of Orestes and Pylades and the The Disquieting Mues as references, Warhol infuses de Chirico’s interest in Greek mythology with his own fascination with the mythology of icons, be they historical figures, Hollywood celebrities, or quintessential pieces of Americana. Warhol took up de Chirico as a reference point following the latter artist’s lauded 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which notably excluded much of de Chirico’s work due to its repetitive nature—an important element of both of their practices that Warhol here nods to in the four-quadrant composition of each of his paintings after de Chirico.
Warhol’s fascination with legacy was, in large part, bound up in fears of his own mortality, informed by his childhood illnesses, the loss of his father at a young age, and the attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas. Likewise, in his old age, Pablo Picasso became more and more focused on his own impending death, and in the 1960s created a series of skeletal drawings of heads, which Warhol used as the basis for a series of paintings. Both Head (After Picasso) and Head (After Picasso) Nº12 (both 1985) are rendered on black and black-and-white grounds, allowing the sparse heads to appear to float on the canvas, as if the face of vitality and life itself is surging out from the darkness, facing death head-on, defiant and triumphant in its vividness before such darkness.
For all of their myriad connecting influences and ideas, Warhol’s decision to paint each and every one of these works are to some degree a question of where he himself stands in relation to these other masters. Indeed, as he cheekily said in reference to Picasso, “When Picasso died, I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime, and I thought, ‘Gee, I could do that in a day.’” Although tongue-in-cheek, Warhol was ever the observer, keenly aware of status and legacy. Perhaps by getting closer to his own idols, he was able to further claim a spot for himself in their pantheon.
