Eight Elvises
Eight Elvises is a 1963 silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol of Elvis Presley. In 2008 it was sold by Annibale Berlingieri for $100 million to a private buyer, making the painting the most valuable work by Andy Warhol at the time; the current owner and location of the painting, which has not been seen publicly since the 1960s, are unknown, although it is believed the buyer was the Royal Qatari family. Eight Elvises is composed of eight identical, overlapping images of Elvis Presley in cowboy attire, silkscreened over a silver background; the painting was a portion of a 37-foot long piece, containing sixteen copies of Elvis, showcased in a 1963 exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition, Warhol's second at the Ferus, contained several other pieces using the same image of Elvis, as well as a series of head shots of Elizabeth Taylor; the images of Elvis were taken from a publicity still from the movie Flaming Star. When the gallery was dismantled, the section with eight images of Elvis became a distinct piece, measuring 6 1⁄2 by 12 feet.
While Warhol created 22 versions of the painting with two Elvises on it, known as Double Elvis, only one piece titled Eight Elvises was created. In 2008 Eight Elvises was sold by Annibale Berlingieri, who had owned it for 40 years, in a private sale for $100 million to an unidentified collector. News of the sale, not announced publicly at the time, was broken by art writer Sarah Thornton and published in The Economist in late 2009; the deal was brokered by Philippe Ségalot, a New York-based art dealer and one time head of the contemporary art department at Christie's auction house. The sale made Eight Elvises one of the most expensive paintings sold, made Warhol only the fifth artist, behind Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning to have a painting sold for at least $100 million; the current location of the painting is unknown. Another painting from 1963, Silver Car Crash, broke the valuation record for a Warhol work set by Eight Elvises when it sold for $105 million at auction in November 2013.
Triple Elvis List of most expensive paintings McCarthy, David. "Andy Warhol's Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963". Art Bulletin. 88: 354–372. Retrieved 30 November 2013
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most through the use of irony, it is associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material. Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns among others in the United States. Pop art is interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion of those ideas. Due to its utilization of found objects and images, it is similar to Dada.
Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves. Pop art takes imagery, in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, seen in the labels of Campbell's Soup Cans, by Andy Warhol; the labeling on the outside of a shipping box containing food items for retail has been used as subject matter in pop art, as demonstrated by Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964. The origins of pop art in North America developed differently from Great Britain. In the United States, pop art was a response by artists, they used impersonal, mundane reality and parody to "defuse" the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of abstract expressionism. In the U. S. some artwork by Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Man Ray anticipated pop art. By contrast, the origins of pop art in post-War Britain, while employing irony and parody, were more academic. Britain focused on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American pop culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while improving the prosperity of a society.
Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture when viewed from afar. Pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism. While pop art and Dadaism explored some of the same subjects, pop art replaced the destructive and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement with a detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture. Among those artists in Europe seen as producing work leading up to pop art are: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters. Although both British and American pop art began during the 1950s, Marcel Duchamp and others in Europe like Francis Picabia and Man Ray predate the movement. During the 1920s, American artists Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis created paintings that contained pop culture imagery "prefiguring" the pop art movement; the Independent Group, founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement. They were a gathering of young painters, architects and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of fine art.
Their group discussions centered on pop culture implications from elements such as mass advertising, product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled Bunk! that he had assembled during his time in Paris between 1947 and 1949. This material of "found objects" such as advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various mass-produced graphics represented American popular culture. One of the collages in that presentation was Paolozzi's I was a Rich Man's Plaything, which includes the first use of the word "pop", appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. Following Paolozzi's seminal presentation in 1952, the IG focused on the imagery of American popular culture mass advertising. According to the son of John McHale, the term "pop art" was first coined by his father in 1954 in conversation with Frank Cordell, although other sources credit its origin to British critic Lawrence Alloway.
"Pop art" as a moniker was used in discussions by IG members in the Second Session of the IG in 1955, the specific term "pop art" first appeared in published print in the article "But Today We Collect Ads" by IG members Alison and Peter Smithson in Ark magazine in 1956. However, the term is credited to British art critic/curator Lawrence Alloway for his 1958 essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media though the precise language he uses is "popular mass culture". "Furthermore, what I meant by it is not what it means now. I used the term, also'Pop Culture' to refer to the products of the mass media, not to works of art that draw upon popular culture. In any case, sometime between the winter of 1954-55 and 1957 the phrase acquired currency in conversation..." Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend the inclusion of the imagery of mass culture in the fine arts. Alloway clarified these terms
Tate
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art museums, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Digital, Culture and Sport; the name "Tate" is used as the operating name for the corporate body, established by the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 as "The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery". The gallery was founded as the National Gallery of British Art; when its role was changed to include the national collection of modern art as well as the national collection of British art, in 1932, it was renamed the Tate Gallery after sugar magnate Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle, who had laid the foundations for the collection. The Tate Gallery was housed in the current building occupied by Tate Britain, situated in Millbank, London. In 2000, the Tate Gallery transformed itself into the current-day Tate, which consists of a network of four museums: Tate Britain, which displays the collection of British art from 1500 to the present day.
All four museums share the Tate Collection. One of the Tate's most publicised art events is the awarding of the annual Turner Prize, which takes place at Tate Britain; the original Tate was called the National Gallery of British Art, situated on Millbank, London at the site of the former Millbank Prison. The idea of a National Gallery of British Art was first proposed in the 1820s by Sir John Leicester, Baron de Tabley, it took a step nearer when Robert Vernon gave his collection to the National Gallery in 1847. A decade John Sheepshanks gave his collection to the South Kensington Museum, known for years as the National Gallery of Art. Forty years Sir Henry Tate, a sugar magnate and a major collector of Victorian art, offered to fund the building of the gallery to house British Art on the condition that the State pay for the site and revenue costs. Henry Tate donated his own collection to the gallery, it was a collection of modern British art, concentrating on the works of modern—that is Victorian era—painters.
It was controlled by the National Gallery until 1954. In 1915, Sir Hugh Lane bequeathed his collection of European modern art to Dublin, but controversially this went to the Tate, which expanded its collection to include foreign art and continued to acquire contemporary art. In 1926 and 1937, the art dealer and patron Joseph Duveen paid for two major expansions of the gallery building, his father had earlier paid for an extension to house the major part of the Turner Bequest, which in 1987 was transferred to a wing paid for by Sir Charles Clore. Henry Courtauld endowed Tate with a purchase fund. By the mid 20th century, it was fulfilling a dual function of showing the history of British art as well as international modern art. In 1954, the Tate Gallery was separated from the National Gallery. During the 1950s and 1960s, the visual arts department of the Arts Council of Great Britain funded and organised temporary exhibitions at the Tate Gallery including, in 1966, a retrospective of Marcel Duchamp.
The Tate began organising its own temporary exhibition programme. In 1979 with funding from a Japanese bank a large modern extension was opened that would house larger income generating exhibitions. In 1987, the Clore Wing opened to house the major part of the Turner bequest and provided a 200-seat auditorium. In 1988, an outpost in north west England opened as Tate Liverpool; this shows various works of modern art from the Tate collection as well as mounting its own temporary exhibitions. In 2007, Tate Liverpool hosted the first time this has been held outside London; this was an overture to Liverpool's being the European Capital of Culture 2008. In 1993, another offshoot opened, Tate St Ives, it exhibits work by modern British artists those of the St Ives School. Additionally the Tate manages the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1980. Neither of these two new Tates had a significant effect on the functioning of the original London Tate Gallery, whose size was proving a constraint as the collection grew.
It was a logical step to separate the "British" and "Modern" aspects of the collection, they are now housed in separate buildings in London. The original gallery is now called Tate Britain and is the national gallery for British art from 1500 to the present day, as well as some modern British art. Tate Modern, in Bankside Power Station on the south side of the Thames, opened in 2000 and now exhibits the national collection of modern art from 1900 to the present day, including some modern British art. In its first year, the Tate Modern was the most popular museum in the world, with 5,250,000 visitors. In the late 2000s, the Tate announced a new development project to the south of the existing building. According to the museum this new development would "transform Tate Modern. An iconic new building will be added at the south of the existing gallery, it will create more spaces for displaying the collection and installation art and learning, all allowing visitors to engage more with art, as well as creating more social spaces for visitors to unwind and
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, sometimes called Plastic Inevitable or EPI, was a series of multimedia events organized by Andy Warhol between 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol's films, dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol's Factory Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable is the title of an 18-minute film by Ronald Nameth with recordings from one week of performances of the shows which were filmed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1966. In December 1966 Warhol included a one-off magazine called The Plastic Exploding Inevitable as part of the Aspen No. 3 package. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable had its beginnings in an event staged on January 13, 1966, at a dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry; this event, called "Up-Tight", included performances by the Velvet Underground and Nico, along with Malanga and Edie Sedgwick as dancers and Barbara Rubin as a performance artist.
Inaugural shows were held at the Dom in New York City in April 1966, advertised in The Village Voice as follows: "The Silver Dream Factory Presents The Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Andy Warhol/The Velvet Underground/and Nico." Shows were held in The Gymnasium in New York and in various cities throughout the United States. Andy Warhol's lights engineer Danny Williams pioneered many innovations that have since become standard practice in rock music light shows. From May 27–29 the EPI played The Fillmore in San Francisco, where Williams built a light show including stroboscopes and film projections onstage. At Bill Graham's request he was soon to build more. Film maker Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and Danny Williams' influential ideas contributed much to the legendary Fillmore Auditorium's prestige and were used at the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, both opening in 1968
Portrait of Seymour H. Knox
Portrait of Seymour H. Knox is a 1985 portrait by Andy Warhol of Seymour H. Knox II, it was donated by the families of his two sons, Mr. and Mrs. Seymour H. Knox III and Mrs. and Mrs. Northrup R. Knox, to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in honor of Seymour H. Knox II for his 60-year contribution as a member of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy; this is one of a number of celebrity portraits that Warhol produced in this duplicative multicolored style. Many were produced in his early 1960s silkscreen period; some of the major celebrity portraits of this style include those of Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mao Zedong and Andy Warhol himself. He produced similar style works of several other minor celebrities. Albright-Knox Art Gallery Page The American Museum Images from Cartography Associates webpage
Batman Dracula
Batman Dracula is a 1964 black and white American film produced and directed by Andy Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics, publishers of comics about the character Batman. The film was screened only at Warhol's art exhibits. A fan of the Batman comic series, Warhol made the movie as a "homage." Batman Dracula is considered to be the first film featuring a blatantly campy Batman. The film was thought to have been lost until scenes from it were shown at some length in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. Jack Smith appeared as Batman. Tally Brown as Florence, Granddaughter of Old Woman and Old Man Beverly Grant as Rose Sam Green Dorothy Dean as Doris Bob Heide Baby Jane Holzer as Rebecca Sister of Sydney and Titus Sally Kirkland Ron Link Naomi Levine as Elizabeth Daughter of Gaston Gerard Malanga Mario Montez Billy Name Taylor Mead Ivy Nicholson as Roxanne Jack Smith as Batman/Dracula Andy Warhol Filmed on the beaches of Long Island, on the roofs of New York. List of American films of 1964 Andy Warhol filmography Batman Dracula on IMDb Batman Dracula at AllMovie
1962 in art
The year 1962 in art involved some significant events and new works. February 6–March 4 – Jane Frank, solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. February 7 – Opening of this year's "Young contemporaries" student exhibition at the RBA Galleries in London at which David Hockney exhibits his four "Demonstrations of Versatility": A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, Swiss Landscape in a Scenic Style, Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style and Figure in a Flat Style. Hockney first meets Patrick Procktor at this exhibition and, with Maurice Agis, John Bowstead and Peter Phillips, Hockney's work is selected for a further exhibition at the ICA. February 10 Ervin Eisch, Lothar Fischer, Dieter Kunzelmann, Renee Nele, Heimrad Prem, Gretel Stadler, Helmut Sturm and Hans-Peter Zimmer are excluded from the Situationist International. Roy Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition opens at Leo Castelli's gallery in New York City, including Look Mickey, featuring his first employment of Ben-Day dots, speech balloons and imagery from comics.
March 15 – Ansgar Elde and Jørgen Nash are excluded from the Situationist International. March 25 – BBC Television in the United Kingdom broadcasts Ken Russell's film Pop Goes the Easel in its Monitor series, exploring the British pop art movement. April 7 – The Stanley Spencer Gallery opens in Spencer's home village of Cookham, England, to display his work. April 10 – Robert Fraser sets up his gallery, specializing in contemporary British art, in the Mayfair district of London. May – The comic book character The Incredible Hulk, created visually by Jack Kirby, is introduced. May–June – David Smith creates the Voltri series of abstract sculptures in Italy. May 25 – The new Coventry Cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, is consecrated in England. Late June – Bert Stern begins shooting The Last Sitting in New York City, the last series of photographs taken of Marilyn Monroe for Vogue magazine. July 9 – Andy Warhol's first solo California gallery exhibition as a fine artist opens at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, marking the West Coast debut of pop art and featuring his Campbell's Soup Cans.
July 23 – The Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum is opened in Cairo. July 25 – The Queen's Gallery is opened to the public at Buckingham Palace, London. August – The comic book character Spider-Man, created visually by Steve Ditko, is introduced. September 25 – The Pasadena Art Museum mounts New Painting of Common Objects, a survey of contemporary American Pop Art. October 23 – "Fifty California Artists" exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. 1962-1963. Catalogue published. Organized by San Francisco Museum of Art with assistance of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Circulated to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Notable artists in exhibition include Elmer Bischoff, Bruce Conner, Roy De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, George Herms, John Paul Jones, Edward Kienholz, Frank Lobdell, Nathan Oliveira, Ed Moses, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg and Peter Voulkos. October 31 – The Sidney Janis Gallery mounts International Exhibition of the New Realists, a survey of contemporary American Pop Art and the European Nouveau Réalisme movement and the first Pop Art group exhibition in an'uptown gallery' in New York City, a rented storefront at 19 W. 57th Street, near the main gallery at 15 E. 57th Street.
Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb quit the Janis Gallery as a protest against the exhibition. November 14 – The British General Post Office issues the first commemorative stamps to be designed by David Gentleman. Michelangelo Pistoletto begins painting on mirrors. Ernst Barlach House completed as an art museum in Germany. City Hall Museum and Art Gallery established in Hong Kong; the Institute of American Indian Arts is set up in New Mexico. Musashino Art University. National Art Museum of China opens in Beijing. Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta inaugurated in Argentina; the comic book character Barbarella, created by Jean-Claude Forest, is introduced in France. Frederic Leighton's painting Flaming June is rediscovered in London. Archibald Prize: Louis Kahan – Patrick White Diane Arbus – Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park Alexander Calder – Sky Hooks Anthony Caro – Early One Morning Pietro Consagra – Conversation with the Wind Jean Dubuffet – Court les rues Yves Klein IKB 191 Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Roy Lichtenstein Blam Brattata Golf Ball Jet Pilot Kiss II Masterpiece Portrait of Madame Cézanne L. S. Lowry – Station Approach Kazuyuki Matsushita and Hideki Shimizu – International Fountain, Seattle Henry Moore – Knife Edge Two Piece 1962–65 Otto Muehl and followers of Viennese Actionism – Die Blutorgel William Roberts – The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 David Shepherd – The Wise Old Elephant Jeffrey Smart – Cahill Expressway Jean Tinguely – Study for an End of the World No. 2 Marie Vorobieff – Homage to Friends from Montparnasse Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup Cans Coca-Cola Green Coca-Cola Bottles Elvis Marilyn Diptych Marilyn 3 Times 129 DIE IN JET Men in Her Life David Wynne The Breath of Life Column John Gielgud (bronze bust
