Andy Warhol

While Andy Warhol's name immediately brings to mind silkscreen prints and portraits of celebrities, his drawings play a central role in his artistic practice. The exhibition “Andy Warhol. Line and image” reveals how this medium, far from being secondary accompanied his entire career.

Trained in the art of illustration, the artist never stopped drawing, even after adopting the mechanical processes that came to define his work. Drawing remained a constant site of experimentation, where images take shape and his distinctive visual language evolve. From an early Self-Portrait dated 1942 to acrylic drawings related to The Last Supper in 1986, Warhol’s drawing output is abundant and varied. Portraits, caricatures, genre scenes, advertising plates, self-promotional portfolios: drawing remained his preferred medium until the end of the1950s. It allowed him to gradually transcend the influences of Klee, Picasso, Cocteau, as well as American artists such as Shahn. Through drawing, Andrew Warhola became Andy Warhol.

After a period dominated by painting and then film between 1963 and 1973, he returned to drawing with new objectives closely linked to his pictorial production, notably commissioned portraits, of which the one of Mao is the paragon. Drawing become a space for experimentation: it allows him to explore chromatic, graphic, and conceptual options, often on a scale close to that of his paintings.

The exhibition is organized around five thematic sections: his early career as an advertising illustrator; the importance of handwriting; his fascination with faces and masks; gay iconography that long remained private; and reflections on death, which became an obsession after the 1968 assassination attempt that nearly cost him his life.

The exhibition brings together approximately 150 drawings, as well as paintings, silkscreen prints on paper, photographs, and archival documents. It highlights the artist’s technical inventiveness and the techniques he developed (stamping, broken lines or lines obtained by transfer, stencils, collage), designed for the reproduction and repetition of images. Rare or overlooked drawings and documents offer insight into the making of the work and provide a glimpse into the heart of the artist’s New York studio, The Factory. These various avenues invite you to reconsider Warhol’s entire work through this dialogue between gesture and reproduction, between hand and machine.

Exhibition organized by the GrandPalaisRmn

CURATOR

Alain Cueff - Art Historian

Scenography: Véronique Dollfus