Essay – The Andy Warhol Museum

Warhol At Pitt: When Andy Returned to Pittsburgh

Matthew Newton — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 22:40:42 +0000

Andy Warhol is one of the most famous Pittsburghers in American history, yet his storied and often scandalous career in New York City tends to overshadow his Rust Belt roots. However, in the years since Warhol’s death, Pittsburgh has become the home of The Andy Warhol Museum, the Andy Warhol Bridge, and several murals celebrating Warhol as its native son. The artist’s legacy is now a major asset to the city of Pittsburgh, but what did Pittsburghers think of him during his lifetime? One resource that could help answer this question is the archives of The Pitt News, the University of Pittsburgh’s student newspaper. Although Warhol first became famous for his Campbells Soup Can paintings in 1962, Pitt students did not get much exposure to Warhol until the late 1960s. It was during the years of 1967–1970 that Andy Warhol’s name first appeared in The Pitt News. That’s when the artist exhibited his Pop Art and experimental films in Pittsburgh for the first time, and when he made his first and only documented return to Pittsburgh. Naturally, this means that college students in Pittsburgh during that era had more opportunities to encounter Warhol and his work than ever before. Even though Warhol was not very popular as a college student in the 1940s, he became wildly popular among college students in the 1960s. Warhol’s coverage in The Pitt News and other local news outlets on his 1968 visit to the Pitt campus shows that Pittsburgh college students took a great interest in Warhol’s art, his films, and his radical queer identity.

The Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits

Matthew Newton — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 15:34:52 +0000

Although often characterized as an apolitical artist, Andy Warhol began making portraits of political figures early in his career. By the end of his life, Warhol had visited the White House on at least five occasions, at the request of three different presidents. In examining his portraits of presidents and his interactions with First Families from the Kennedy administration to the Reagan administration, we can see both Warhol’s growing willingness to delve into the realm of politics and Warhol’s increasing acceptance by the political elite.

Warhol’s first-known rendering of JFK appears as a rough sketch in one of his early drawings of a newspaper front page, Pirates Sieze Ship (1961). In his book Popism (1980), Warhol remarked, “I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart…” yet in this drawing Kennedy appears sweaty and tired after a “tough day” of cabinet meetings shortly after his inauguration.¹ The attractive and dynamic Kennedy that we tend to remember shows up in Warhol’s artworks from later in the decade. Kennedy’s smiling face is partially visible in some of Warhol’s Jackie portraits, in which Warhol had appropriated a photograph of the happy couple greeting their supporters in Dallas.

How Warhol’s Complicated Relationship with Catholicism Influenced his Art

Matthew Newton — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:18:54 +0000

In 2019, José Carlos Diaz, chief curator at The Andy Warhol Museum, wrote about the Pop artist’s complex Catholic faith in relation to his artistic production. His essay was published in the exhibition catalogue for Andy Warhol: Revelation, which was on view at The Warhol from October 2019 to March 1, 2020, and is currently on view at The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, through November 29, 2020. To mark the occasion, we’ve republished Diaz’s essay in its entirety.

Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith, and AIDs

Jessica Beck — Wed, 27 May 2020 15:46:25 +0000

In 2018, Jessica Beck, Milton Fine curator of art, wrote about Warhol as a queer artist in the age of AIDs, a topic considered taboo until only recently. Her essay was published in Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, the catalogue accompanying that year’s Warhol retrospective at The Whitney. In light of COVID-19, Beck recently reflected on her research and the parallels between the AIDs epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic. Her original 2018 essay is included after this new author’s note.