The Grand Palais, in Paris,
hosts, through July 13 2009, an extraordinary series of the portraits that made Andy Warhol so famous.
The artist started in 1962 with the portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and revisited the Mona Lisa and Elvis Presley. From 1967 to 1987, he fulfilled commissions and using a process that he began to adopt systematically, produced the portraits of dozens of different personalities, celebrated or unknown, re-establishing the portrait genre, by introducing new codes.
Warhol held up a mirror in which the social microcosm and the bigger world beyond could see themselves reflected.
In the series presented in the Grand Palais, Warhol painted a picture of an entire society and invented a new form of artistic production – serial and almost mass produced. The effect of the principle of repetition was a central preoccupation of Warhol’s work during this period.
In his studio, “The Factory”, Andy Warhol developed a systematic process in the early 1970s – he made up his models and photographed them with a Big Shot Polaroid. He carefully selected the shots, then painted and silk screened the portraits (among which Man Ray, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Willy Brandt, Edward Kennedy, Princesse de Monaco, Gunther Sachs,Yves Saint-Laurent, Sonia Rykiel…).
Two hundred and fifty works – selected from the thousand portraits executed since the early 1960s – are on show now, at Les Galeries du Grand Palais, in Paris.
A must of your spring in Paris…
Through July 13 2009
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais
3, avenue du Général-Eisenhower
75008 Paris
Tél : 01 44 13 17 17