Beschreibung:

Andy Warhol Sidney Janis 1967 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas. 190.5 x 142.2 cm. (75 x 56 in). Stamped with the Estate and Foundation seals and numbered ‘P060.053’ twice on the overlap.
Provenance Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, Private collection, New York Exhibited Pasadena Art Museum, 12 May, 1970 – 14 January, 1971; Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum, 16 October – 22 November, 1970; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 16 December, 1970 – 14 January, 1971, Andy Warhol Literature R. Crone, Andy Warhol New York, 1970 & 1976 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Andy Warhol is the Twentieth Century’s undisputed king of the portrait. While his approach to portraiture evolved throughout his career, and the style and subject matter of the portraits varied widely, the concept of the portrait itself remained an important, recurrent, and imminently recognisable element of his artistic oeuvre. From the haunting and introspective self-portraits which reflect Warhol’s obsession with death and his own mortality to the flamboyant and colourful celebrity and society portraits of the 1970s and 1980s (a veritable chronicle of an era whose vivacity and liveliness are still arresting today), an examination of Warhol’s portraits offers not only an exploration of the range of his artistic expression but also reveals his obsession with celebrity and nearly verifies his wry aphorism that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” (Andy Warhol His images may have come from diverse sources, both public and private – from newspaper photographs, Hollywood film stills, and official portraits as well as intimate photo booth sessions – but the effect is always equally profound and striking. By consciously idealising the image and removing all flaws – indeed, all traces of humanity – Warhol and his machine-like approach to art reduce his subjects to a mere two-dimensional image, albeit a stunning one. Warhol perverts our perceptions of these public figures and condenses living beings into idealised, superficial images which exist solely for the sake of visual pleasure. The vicissitude of emotions displayed by Jackie Kennedy in newspaper photographs taken before and after her husband’s death becomes nothing more than a series of images for public consumption; the mask-like expression on a cartoonishly made-up Marilyn Monroe and even the carefully-chosen flashes of colour which obscure Lenin’s menacing stare make us forget the legend behind the image. It is no surprise, then, that Warhol, whose obsession with celebrity culture and incessant need to document his surroundings dominated his daily existence, would choose Sidney Janis as a portrait subject. Janis, who was entering his seventh decade when Warhol created his iconic portrait in 1967, was an art world star whose credibility and collector’s eye were widely recognised and whose gallery was second in prestige only to Leo Castelli’s. Although Sidney Janis may have made his initial fortune in the clothing business, his true passion had always been art. During the 1920s, Janis and his wife Harriet visited galleries and studios in New York and Paris. It was in Paris that he met Mondrian, Picasso, and Léger, whose works he acquired in addition to those by Matisse, Dalí, and Henri Rousseau As a result of his extraordinary collection and his personal friendship with important artists such as Gorky, Ernst, Léger, Mondrian, and Duchamp, Janis was invited to join the Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art in 1934, which exhibited paintings from his private collection in that same year. Andy Warhol Seven Decades of Janis, 1967 In 1948, Janis opened the Sidney Janis gallery, which quickly grew to prominence as a result of its reputation for scholarly exhibitions of contemporary artists and Twentieth Century movements such as Dada (organized by Duchamp), Futurism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Throughout the 1950s, Janis represented the most important artists of the mid-century New York school – Pollock, de Kooning, Guston, Kline, Rothko, Baziotes, Motherwell, Gorky, Gottlieb, and Albers. Janis had a reputation as a trend-spotter, and he was to anger many of these abstract expressionist