ANDY WARHOL: TEN PORTRAITS OF JEWS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to present Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.

November 14 – December 21, 2024

Arrayed together, the total body of ten collages provides a potent counter to Warhol’s famous remark of 1963—“I want to be a machine”—revealing insights into his haptic and experimental artmaking, and the decisive evolution of his renowned Pop portraits. The present series illuminates celebrated figures whose achievements shaped the course of the twentieth century in the realms of the humanities, arts, and sciences. Importantly, it is also the first body of work Warhol created depicting notable historical individuals. The idea for the series was brought to the artist by the art dealer Ronald Feldman in the late 1970s—after Warhol had produced five painted silkscreen portraits of Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, in 1975.

The exhibited, complete group of ten collages provides an exceptional and meaningful window into Warhol’s process of experimentation and artistic decision-making on a grand scale. In the case of Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, a portfolio of prints (in an edition of 200) preceded the silkscreened paintings (five of each figure) by several months—with the acetate collages informing both the acrylic canvases and serigraph prints; Warhol used the same silkscreens for both the paintings and the graphic works.

The series was exhibited widely upon its completion in 1980, most notably at the Jewish Museum, New York, where ten prints and fifteen paintings were on view. The critical response to the works ranged, with some remarking on the commerciality of the series and others celebrating the aesthetic achievement of the compositions.

In addition to presaging the Catholic artist’s religiously iconographic works of the 1980s, such as his Last Supper silkscreens (begun in 1984), Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century persists as a consequential exploration of identity, and a historical and formal touchstone in his oeuvre.