On June 10, 2017, the Bruce Museum will open Spring into Summer with Andy Warhol and Friends! The new exhibition takes an unusual approach to this most famous of Pop artists.
“Although we tend to associate Warhol’s work with artifice and mass production—think of his bold images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans—there is another side to the artist that is often overlooked, his interest in the natural, the real, and the intimate,” says Kenneth E. Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art and Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator of Art. Silver is curating the show with the assistance of Courtney Long, Bruce Museum Zvi Grunberg Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17.
The exhibition builds on three important works in the Bruce Museum collection. Warhol’s Little Red Book, 1971, a gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, features ten unique polaroid portraits of the artist’s friends -- New Canaan architect Philip Johnson and his partner David Whitney, fashion model Donna Jordan, art critic Barbara Rose, and a self-portrait. Flowers (Hand-Colored), 1974, a suite of ten silkscreens prints given to the Bruce by Peter Brant, depict floral still-lives. Two large silkscreen portrait prints, Sachiko, 1977, are gifts of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.
Beyond these Bruce Museum treasures, significant loans will allow Spring into Summer with Andy Warhol and Friends! to offer an expanded view of Warhol’s aesthetic universe, including an important four-part painted portrait, never before exhibited in public, of Sachiko Goodman, along with the scores of polaroid studies that the artist made in preparation for the commission; and a fine pencil portrait by Warhol of Philip Johnson. Beyond the human subjects, Warhol’s silkscreen series of 1983, Endangered Species, offers ten “animal portraits” including a San Francisco Silverspot butterfly and an American Bald Eagle. Fortuitously, the great American realist painter Philip Pearlstein, Warhol’s undergraduate roommate, has kindly agreed to lend his surprisingly abstract rendition of an American Eagle (1949) to the exhibition as well.
Finally, following the lead of Warhol’s ground-breaking exhibition of 1970, Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol, in which the artist retrieved and put on display long-forgotten objects from the storerooms of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Bruce’s own storerooms have been plundered for specimens from its historic natural science collection—butterflies, birds, and a few other creatures.
This exhibition is generously supported by The Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund, Amica Insurance, Bank of America, Crozier, Susan and Bill Mahoney, The 2016-17 Bruce Museum Council, and the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
“We’re thrilled to deepen our existing partnership with the Bruce Museum by bringing these historically significant art pieces to the Southern Connecticut community,” said Robert Pizzella, Managing Director, U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management. “This is just another way we are able to provide access to the arts, in addition to offering Bank of America cardholders free admission every month through our Museums on Us program.”
The Bruce Museum will offer free admission on opening day of the Warhol exhibition on Saturday, June 10, in conjunction with the Connecticut Open House Day, and on all Tuesdays. Bank of America cardholders also receive free admission on the first Sunday of every month.
The Bruce Museum is located just off I-95, Exit 3, at 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT. General admission is $10 adults, $8 seniors and students, free to members and children less than 5 years old.
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Exhibition Programs for Spring into Summer with Andy Warhol and Friends!
The changes wrought by Andy Warhol’s work on painting and art are well known. Less discussed is the impact on photography. Warhol played a crucial role in changing the climate for image making and helped usher in a photographic era of bad pictures of bad subjects. (It’s no coincidence that both Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, both pilloried for being pedestrian photographers, spent time at Warhol’s “factory.”) This lecture explores Warhol’s influence, direct and indirect, on photography since the 1970s.
Lyle Rexer is the author of several books, including The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (2009) and Photography’s Antiquarian Avant Garde: the New Wave in Old Processes (2002). In addition, he has published many catalogue essays and articles on art, architecture, and photography and contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Art in America, Aperture, BOMB, Parkett and DAMn. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions in the United States and internationally, most recently “The Edge of Vision,” a selection of contemporary abstract photography. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a columnist for Photograph magazine.
Advance registration required. Free for Bruce members, $15 for non-members. At the door: $10 Bruce members, $25 non-members. See brucemuseum.org for details.
Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
This riveting and often deeply moving film portrait of the most famous and famously controversial artist of the second half of the 20th century is the first to explore the complete spectrum of Warhol’s astonishing artistic output, stretching across five decades from the late 1940s to his untimely death in 1987. Combining powerful on-camera interviews and rare still and motion picture footage, it is also the first to put Warhol himself—his humble family background and formative experiences in Pittsburgh, and his crucial apprenticeship as a commercial artist in New York—back into the presentation of his life.
Narrated by Laurie Anderson. Includes interviews with Irving Blum, Bob Colacello, Donna De Salvo, Vincent Fremont, Dave Hickey, Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jeff Koons, Paul Morrissey, Billy Name, George Plimpton, Neil Printz, John Richardson, Ronald Tavel and John Warhola. A special two-part presentation for American Masters.
Sunday, July 16, 1:00 - 4:00 pm. Warhol Summer Bash Family Day. Join us for a groovy, good time! Fun, hands-on activities from inspired by the exhibition Spring into Summer with Warhol and Friends! A rockin’, sixties and seventies-inspired music performance by Little Rockers at 2:00 pm, This 45-minute experience will include musical activities with instruments and movement for a totally unique rock show. Performance is recommended for ages 2 - 8. Seating limited. Generously sponsored by Whole Foods.
