Displaying items by tag: pop art

The Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City is currently presenting the exhibition “Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein -- Walls.” The show includes paintings, drawings, and collages dating from the early 1970s to the 1990s, some of which have never been exhibited before.

All of the works on view feature walls as the main subject matter. The exhibition illustrates how Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein both explored space and the notion of reality versus illusion in their work. Pieces such as Johns’ “Untitled,” which features a well-known Picasso image hanging on a wooden wall, and Lichtenstein’s “Trompe L’oeil with Léger Head and Paintbrush,” which includes an image from Fernand Léger, show how both artists also played with appropriation and referentiality in their wall works.

The Castelli Gallery was founded by the pioneering art dealer Leo Castelli in 1957. The gallery quickly became the international epicenter for Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art and exhibited works by Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Lichtenstein, and Johns. Castelli passed away in 1999 and the gallery is now directed by his wife, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli. The Castelli Gallery maintains a commitment to exhibiting the best of postwar American art.

“Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein -- Walls” will be on view at the Leo Castelli Gallery through June 27. 

To commemorate its 20th anniversary, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has reinstalled its permanent collection. This is the first time the institution has reimagined its holdings since it opened to the public in 1994. The Warhol’s collection, which includes paintings, photographs, sculptures, prints, and films by the Pop artist, has been hung chronologically across five of the museum’s seven floors. Well-known masterpieces will appear alongside rarely seen artworks and archival material when the galleries open to the public during a gala event on May 17.   

Eric Shiner, director of The Warhol, said, “We can’t wait to share the new look and feel of The Warhol with our visitors. Our goal is to both engage and educate our guests so that everyone leaves with a true understanding of who Andy was and why he matters so much. To keep the content fresh, the curatorial team will rotate artworks in all galleries on a frequent basis. It will be a fun experience and definitely worth a visit if you haven’t been to the museum in a while.”

The museum’s seventh floor will present artworks and objects that explore Warhol’s relationship with his hometown of Pittsburgh. Works on view include newly uncovered material relating to Warhol’s childhood and pieces from his family’s collection of rare paintings and photographs.

The gala in May will kick-off a year-long celebration at the museum, which is the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world.

Sotheby’s will offer a rare series by Andy Warhol titled “Six Self Portraits” during its Evening Auction of Contemporary Art on May 14 in New York. Created in 1986, the self-portraits are among the last works created by the pioneering Pop artist.

“Six Self Portraits” was acquired by the current owners in July 1986 from the London gallery of dealer Anthony d’Offay for $57,500. The works anchored the first and only show in Warhol’s career dedicated to his self-portraiture. Purchased the Sunday before the exhibition opened to the public, it was the first sale in an ultimately sold-out and fabled exhibition. “Six Self Portraits” is expected to fetch between $25 million and $35 million next month at Sotheby’s. 

Warhol made his first significant self-portrait in 1963, followed by a small series in 1964. In 1966, Warhol constructed a series of self-portraits in what would become one of his signature styles -- a grid of bright, repeated images. In wasn’t until he made “Six Self Portraits” twenty years later that he would find an equally powerful self-image.

On Friday, April 18, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, will receive Roy Lichtenstein’s towering sculpture, “Tokyo Brushstroke I & II.” The work, which is being loaned to the museum by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, courtesy of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman and the Fuhrman Family Foundation, will be placed on the Parrish’s front lawn, near the Montauk Highway. It will be the first long-term outdoor installation at the museum’s new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, which opened in November 2012.

The two-part sculpture, which stands 33 feet tall at its highest point and weighs around 17,000 pounds, will be installed with a crane into a cement brace and joined together on site. The work is from Lichtenstein’s “brushstroke” sculpture series from the 1990s. Similar works can be found in Madrid, Paris, Singapore, and Washington, D.C.

Lichtenstein, a pioneer of the Pop art movement, relocated to Southampton (less than five miles from the Parrish’s current campus) in 1970 and began an enduring relationship with the museum.

Christie’s announced that it will offer Andy Warhol’s “White Marilyn” at auction in New York on May 13. The work, which was created in 1962 shortly after Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death, is regarded as one of the finest examples from Warhol’s seminal Death and Disasters series. It was also one of the Pop artist’s first silkscreens, which soon became his medium of choice.

“White Marilyn” carries a pre-sale estimate of $12 million-$18 million. The iconic portrait was one of eight Marilyn silkscreens selected for Warhol’s first one-man show at Eleanor Ward’s renowned Stable Gallery in New York, and was once part of the gallery owner’s personal collection.

Laura Paulson, Christie’s Chairman and International Director for Post-War and Contemporary Art, said, “We are extremely proud to present White Marilyn, one of the nucleuses of Warhol's first ever and most significant solo exhibition organized by Eleanor Ward for the Stable Gallery in 1962. With his unique ability to fuse painting and photography into an unforgettably iconic image, Warhol condensed all the themes of his art in this magnificent ‘White Marilyn’ which keeps one such icon alive and forever in style. Compared to the perfectly coiffed media propagated publicity images of the actress, in ‘White Marilyn’ she appears touched by humanity, and transcends reality to become a modern Saint. Warhol dedicated this work to Ward and expressed his gratitude scattering hearts on the reverse of the painting.”

In November 2013, Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)," another silkscreen from his Death and Disaster series, realized $105.4 million at Sotheby’s -- a record for the artist at auction.

Since September 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has acquired a number of important works from the 15th through 20th centuries including tempera-and-gold drawings on vellum from the Middle Ages and works on paper by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Earl A. Powell III, the director of the National Gallery of Art, said, “These acquisitions are masterworks from the Middle Ages to the current moment that represent the highest levels of creativity in media ranging from printmaking and manuscript illumination to easel painting and photography. We are delighted that they can be shared with the public as part of our permanent collection.”

Among the museum’s recent acquisitions are a woodcut-illustrated book of Giovanni Boccaccio’s ‘Seminal History of Famous Women’, the Gallery’s earliest German woodcut book; ‘Still Life with Peacock Pie,’ a banquet piece measuring more than four feet across by the Dutch Golden Age painter Pieter Claesz; one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s finest versions of ‘Avenue of Cypresses at Villa d’Este’; a watercolor by Cézanne titled ‘A Stand of Trees Along a River Bank’; an early drawing by Gauguin titled ‘Seated Nude Seen from Above’; a pastel of Waterloo Bridge by Monet; and Pop artist Jim Dine’s ‘Name Painting.’ The National Gallery of Art also received works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marc Chagall, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell from the celebrated Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection. 

The National Gallery of Art was established in 1937 for the people of the United States by a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress. Financier and art collector, Andrew W. Mellon, donated a portion of his sizeable art collection to the museum, forming its core holdings. The National Gallery of Art’s collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures and decorative arts spans from the Middle Ages to the present and includes the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas as well as the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK has acquired a number of works by Andy Warhol. The first acquisition, ‘Coca-Cola (3),’ was purchased at Christie’s for $57.3 million in November. It had previously belonged to a private collection.

The Crystal Bridges’ other Warhol acquisitions were gifts -- an early painting from the artist’s time as a student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and a book of 21 dye diffusion transfer prints, which are being donated to the museum by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

‘Coca-Cola (3)’ and the early painting will go on view alongside the Warhol works already in the Crystal Bridges’ collection on December 26. The prints will not be immediately exhibited. 

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is honoring the legendary gallerist and collector Ileana Sonnabend with the exhibition ‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New.’

The show brings together works that were shown in her galleries in Paris and New York between the 1960s and 1980s. Sonnabend, who opened the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1961, was instrumental in bringing American art of the 1960s, most notably Pop Art and Minimalism, to Europe. Sonnabend opened a New York outpost in 1970 and conversely introduced Americans to European art movements such as Arte Povera.

‘Ambassador for the New’ features works by approximately 40 artists, including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, and Jeff Koons. Works on view have been pulled from MoMA’s own collection as well as other public and private holdings.

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ will be on view at MoMA through April 21, 2014.  

A portrait of actress Farrah Fawcett by Pop artist Andy Warhol is the subject of a heated legal battle. Actor Ryan O’Neal, who had a long relationship with Fawcett, is fighting the University of Texas at Austin for ownership of the work.

When she passed away in 2009, Fawcett left her art collection to the University of Texas, her alma mater. However, O’Neal is claiming that Warhol had personally given him the silkscreen of Fawcett. The case, which went to trial Wednesday, is expected to take two weeks to resolve.

Warhol’s portrait of Fawcett is estimated to be worth $30 million.

Two monumental works by Andy Warhol could garner over $120 million when they head to auction this fall. Silver Car Crash (Double Distaster), a 8 x 13 foot silkscreen from the artist’s Death and Disaster series, will be offered during Sotheby’s contemporary art sale on November 13 and Coca-Cola (3), one of Warhol’s most famous pop art paintings, will be sold during Christie’s post-war and contemporary auction on November 12.

Silver Car Crash, which has only been seen in public once in the last 26 years, is expected to bring around $60 million while Warhol’s black-and-white portrait of a coca cola bottle will likely sell for $40-$60 million. Silver Car Crash has been in the same private collection since 1988 and will go on display at Sotheby’s London on October 12 and in New York on November 1.

A highly influential artist who continues to command high selling prices, Warhol’s works fetched $329 million at auction last year.