calendario eventi  :: 

X

18/1/2008

Andy Warhol

Jablonka, Berlin

Jablonka Galerie is proud to present, as its first exhibition in 2008, the collages for Andy Warhol’s graphic portfolio Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century. These 14 collages permit a unique insight into the conceptualization and development of one of his most successful graphic projects.

The series Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century was initiated by Ronald Feldman in 1980. Around the office, the working title was “Jewish Geniuses, ” because Feldman had sent down a list of over one hundred candidates and every one of them was an indisputable master in his of her field. “Why are they all so smart, Bob?” Andy asked. “Could it be something in their diet? Don’t you wish you were Jewish sometimes?” Andy Warhol took up the challenge to make portraits of these historical figures and applied graphic techniques which he had used earlier for his depictions of contemporary celebrities such as Mick Jagger (1975) and glamorous street people such as the Ladies and Gentlemen (1975-76). Before working on the collages and then the prints and painting series, a long process of selection took place, during which more than a hundred possible candidates were discussed, until the final choice of ten leading Jewish figures from the spheres of literature, film, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and science was determined. The final choices were more Feldman’s than Andy’s: Einstein,

Freud, Kafka, Martin Buber, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, Louis Brandeis, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Marx Brothers. Andy wasn’t sure who Buber and Brandeis were. He liked Golda Meir, “because we already have a screen of her. ” And he showed some mild enthusiasm for the Hollywood contingent, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, and for Sarah Bernhardt, who he couldn’t believe was Jewish.
The collages are preparatory works for a portfolio of ten silkscreens to be published by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. As such, they permit insights into the working process on this project.

The collages are at once more complex and more straightforward than the editioned prints. They are more open than the prints, which are cropped closely from the collage images, leaving out the white background of the collages. The collages show how the print motifs were developed through the addition of layers of color fields or patches and

drawing on top of the photographic source images. The image of The Marx Brothers, for instance, shows one aspect of the finished print in that it is concentrated on one row of the three heads of Chico, Groucho, and Harpo only, merely augmented by three superimposed colored rectangles. The four variants of Albert Einstein show that the selection of the final image to be used for the print edition was taken with the same degree of detachment as the deadpan application of the drawing and color elements that were to add that “little bit more” which Andy Warhol supposed his audience would demand of the portraits he made. The three remaining variants are not necessarily “worse” than the chosen one.

This sense of detachment – a key hallmark of an artist’s oeuvre who once famously claimed that he was married to his tape recorder – is visible in the drawing style that is so obviously traced from the photographic source image that it comes across as masterly and mechanical at the same time. This detachment is also detectable in the fact that it was not uncommon at all for Warhol to work on a subject proposed by someone else – many of his most famous images had been initiated by friends or even commissioned by dealers. The work of Andy Warhol has always challenged notions of originality and artistic quality in the most profound and powerful way, and the project of the

Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century is no exception. It is therefore not surprising that upon publication the print portfolio was an immediate commercial success and also posed a critical problem, prompting the writer Hilton Kramer to claim that the artistic merit of this project was “nil.” Looking at the collages and the print portfolio today, however, it becomes clear the critical comments of this sort are beside the point because they fail to acknowledge the crucial importance of Warhol’s detachment in the production of these images. Even with their “expressionistic” surfaces, the images of the Jews of the 20th century are just as cool as Warhol’s images from the 1960s. The collages for Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century demonstrate how images took form in Andy Warhol’s office. The selfconfident
application of color and drawing corresponds to Warhol’s thinking.

He seemed embarrassed and annoyed at the first showing of Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, at the Jewish Center of Washington, in Bethesda, Maryland, in March 1980. “Everybody’s Jewish here, Bob,” he said. “It’s a Jewish center, Andy. What do you expect?” “They’re all asking me ‘why’ and ‘how’, Bob. What do I say?” “Tell them you admire the intelligence and creativity of the Jewish people, because you do.” “I do?” A man came up to Andy and asked, “Did you use all these different patches of color to show all the different facets of Gertrude Stein’s personality?” Andy said: “Yes.”*

Image: Andy Warhol
Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century
Collages: George Gerschwin, 1980
Silkscreen Ink and coloraid paper on acetate stapled to arches aquarelle (cold pressed) paper
129,5 x 116,8 cm (51 x 46 in.)
Courtesy: Jablonka Galerie, Cologne/Berlin
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York

All quotes are from Bob Colacello: Holy Terror. Andy Warhol Close Up.
New York: HarperCollins, 1990, p. 444 – 445.
We are happy to respond to any queries at
Tel.: +49-30-21236890, Fax.: +49-30-21236891; info@jablonkagalerie.com

Jablonka
Kochstrasse 60 - Berlin

stampa

permanent link