The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Montreal, Quebec
25 September 2008-18 January 2009
For the first time in the historiography of Andy Warhol, the fundamental role of music in the artist’s work will be explored in the exhibition Warhol Live, presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from September 25, 2008, to January 18, 2009.
This original presentation will take a chronological and thematic approach, sequence by sequence – from the film music Warhol discovered in his youth to the disco scene at Studio 54. It will juxtapose Warhol’s major emblematic works (Elvis, Marilyn, Liz Taylor, Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, Self-portraits and Campbell's Soup Cans…) around this central theme, with others that are less well-known (album covers, illustrations, photos, Polaroids…), created in resonance with music and dance.
Also included will be some of the artist’s films, such as Sleep, Empire and the Screen Tests of the members of the Velvet Underground (Nico, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker), and Andy Warhol's TV, along with music and sound recordings that reveal the creative energy and the connections that underlie Warhol’s work. Music will be heard in all the galleries: sound will serve as an essential narrative element throughout the exhibition, setting the musical stage for each sequence in the presentation.
The exhibition will feature over a hundred paintings and prints, as many photographs, eighty works on paper (drawings, posters, and magazines), sixty album covers, some three-dimensional works, two installations and six projections of films and videos, as well as a number of important objects and documents from the artist’s personal archives. The works come from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and from leading public and private collections in Europe and North America, including a Montreal collection comprising all of Warhol’s album covers. The exhibition is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Music: An Essential Part of Warhol’s Work
While Warhol’s interest in music comes across highly anecdotally and briefly in his Journal and his numerous interviews, music and its representation in his work is remarkable and predominant: it is an invisible yet essential component.
From a drawing in 1948 for the cover of Cano – the student magazine at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which depicts an orchestra in the “blotted line” technique – to the celebrity portraits of Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli and Prince, Warhol created dozens of portraits of twentieth-century pop icons, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, from the Beatles to Michael Jackson, throughout his career.
From 1949, the year he arrived in New York, to 1987, the last year of his life, he also illustrated some fifty album covers, from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to Aretha Franklin, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Diana Ross and Blondie. Attesting to Warhol’s changing commissions and affinities, the thread that runs through this iconography reads like a history of postwar American musical tastes, from classical to jazz, rock, pop and soul, disco and hip-hop.
In Warhol’s world, music goes far beyond mere iconography. Warhol orchestrated the “All Tomorrow's Parties” at the Silver Factory, providing an ideal, ephemeral stage for Edie Sedgwick, his moving muse and first alter ego; he served as a producer for the Velvet Underground; he made an artistic contribution to Merce Cunningham’s choreography Rain Forest; he turned Studio 54 into an extension of his studio.
Set to music, the invisible art that animates bodies and situates beings in space and in their time, he imagined the entire work of art that was Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He imagined himself in Sculpture Invisible. He used music in his films and filmed concerts. He produced music videos and met with musicians, notably for Interview, the magazine he founded in 1969.
And above all, through the play of mirrors and osmosis he projected on his contemporaries, he himself became a rock star equal to Mick Jagger or Debbie Harry, his final inspiration.
Exhibition Design
Guillaume de Fontenay’s exhibition design will evoke some of the highlights in this relationship between art and music through reconstitutions that, while not exact re-creations like “period rooms,” will provide a closer look at the Silver Factory, with a mise en scène by photographer Billy Name, the multimedia show Exploding Plastic Inevitable to music by the Velvet Underground, Silver Clouds created for Merce Cunningham’s choreography Rain Forest to music by David Tudor, and the musical ambience of Studio 54, a veritable extension of Warhol’s studio from the 1970s to the end of his life.
Publications
Accompanying the exhibition will be two publications, the first ever dedicated to this aspect of Warhol’s work: a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s album covers, written by Paul Maréchal, the collector of this body of work, and a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue including essays by numerous Warhol specialists, as well as an illustrated chronology of Warhol’s work. These works will be published in English and French by the Museum’s Publishing Department, in association with Prestel.
Curators
The exhibition is curated by Stéphane Aquin, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Emma Lavigne, curator at the Musée national dart moderne/CCI, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Matt Wrbican, archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. They are assisted by Greg Pierce, assistant curator, Andy Warhol Museum, for the exhibitions film and video programming and by Timothy Anglin Burgard, The Ednah Root Curator of American Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
This news message is supported by The Bazaar, a marketplace to buy and sell creative objects. Earn more revenue by selling your prints, downloadable images, or custom products. Set up your store today and stand a chance to have your products featured on DesignTAXI, towards millions of lovers of creative content!
