ANDY WARHOL: WHO IS WHO?

Skarstedt is pleased to announce Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, an exhibition that delves into the myriad influences art history had on Warhol’s oeuvre.

October 14 – December 7, 2024

Warhol’s reinterpretations of iconic works simultaneously elevated their status even further while embedding himself into that place of prominence. As Germano Celant observes, “But the history of art is itself a concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too in the magma of his imagination…he turned [these artists] into dead flowers, so that the absolute subjectivity of art became once again a problem of media communication: a reproduction, cut and edited, with unnatural, technological colors.”

In using the art of others to speak to contemporary themes, Warhol likewise placed himself within the history of artists appropriating other artists, a theme which began with the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and continues today in artists such as Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman. 

No discussion of art historical lineage would be complete without an ode to Leonardo da Vinci, and no subject would better serve Warhol’s own interests in the iconic than the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was indeed one of Warhol’s earliest subjects, begun in 1963 following the painting’s celebrated visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was a sensation—a celebrity in its own right, not unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom he was also painting at the time. Warhol returned to the icon again in the 1970s in a suite of paintings that includes Mona Lisa Four Times (1973), a nuanced painting that not only exhibits his continued fascination with the subject, but highlights his more painterly experiments of the 1970s, its deep tones of black and brown anticipating the Reversals he would make at the end of the decade.

For all of their myriad connecting influences and ideas, Warhol’s decision to paint each and every one of these works are to some degree a question of where he himself stands in relation to these other masters. Indeed, as he cheekily said in reference to Picasso, “When Picasso died, I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime, and I thought, ‘Gee, I could do that in a day.’” Although tongue-in-cheek, Warhol was ever the observer, keenly aware of status and legacy. Perhaps by getting closer to his own idols, he was able to further claim a spot for himself in their pantheon.