Andy Warhol: Big Shot

Posted by: Ian – Apr 16, 2009

This March the University of Richmond Museums opened a much anticipated exhibit of Andy Warhol photographs. The Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond recently acquired 153 photographs taken by Warhol between 1970 and 1987. The sizeable acquisition was a gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to commemorate the foundation’s 20th anniversary.

In October 2007, the foundation divided 28,543 original Warhol photographs, valued at over $28 million, between 183 different university museums and collections in the United States as part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy program. The University of Richmond received 102 Polaroid photographs and 51 black-and-white silver gelatin prints.

Foundation President, Joel Wachs, said the purpose of the Photographic Legacy Program is to provide communities across the U.S. with greater access to Warhol’s work and process. This collection gives important insight into the artist’s significant, yet largely unknown body of work.

Photographic Legacy Program curator, Jenny Moore, said in a recent press release, “A wealth of information about Warhol’s process and his interactions with his sitters is revealed in these images… Through his rigorous – though almost unconscious – consistency in shooting, the true idiosyncrasies of his subjects were revealed. Often, he would shoot a person or event with both cameras, cropping one in Polaroid color as a “photograph” and snapping the other in black and white as a “picture”. By presenting both kinds of images side-by-side, the Photographic Legacy Program allows viewers to move back and forth between moments of Warhol’s ‘art’, ‘work’ and ‘life’ – inseparable parts of a fascinating whole.”

Warhol frequently used Polaroid photographs as the basis of his commissioned portraits, prints and paintings. He obsessively collected photographs from shoots and they were meticulously catalogued for storage. The Harnett Museum exhibition features photographic portraits of Roy Lichtenstein, Jon Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jack Nicholson, Dorothy Hamill, as well as several snapshot studies for other works. Included among them are the beginnings of Warhol’s famed banana works and “Fiesta Pig”.

The show focuses Warhol’s interest in philosophy and the roles that fame, sexuality, androgyny and gender play determining “beauty”. The collection includes a number of nudes, portraits of drag queens, fashion designers, models and gender benders. Portraits of fashion icons like Evelyn Khun, Tina Chow and Carolina Herrera also appear in the exhibit. Many of the portraits, particularly of women, feature Warhol’s typical styling of high contrast white foundation, dark eye make-up and red lipstick done in order to disguise the sitter’s age and accentuate youth.

The collection blurs the line between art and memorabilia and even features a Polaroid Big Shot camera with which Warhol was accustomed to working. Warhol’s access to celebrity inner circles and his own busy personal and social life are also documented in the exhibit, illustrating his theory that “a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous.”

The exhibit was curated by Lucy Green, a current senior at the University of Richmond, and guided by Richard Waller, Executive Director, University of Richmond Museums, and N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums. “Andy Warhol: Selected Photographs from the Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts” will be on display at the Harnett Museum of Art, at the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond through May 15, 2009. For more information visit http://museums.richmond.edu/.