"Ten Portraits of 20th Century Jews" donated to the museum

A Jewish American collector has donated Andy Warhol's series "Ten Portraits of 20th Century Jews" to Tel Aviv's Diaspora Museum , museum curator Hagai Segev said. 

Warhol, the American painter and avant-garde filmmaker who was one of the preeminent figures of American Pop Art, painted his portraits of Jewish cultural luminaries in the late 1970s.

The portraits, originally published as a portfolio of silkscreen prints on paper, are of Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Golda Meir and Gertrude Stein. Advertisement


Warhol referred to this pantheon of great thinkers, politicians, performers and writers as "Jewish Geniuses," the Jewish Museum site notes.
He was so pleased with the series' commercial success that he decided to make a second version on canvas.
The anonymously donated collection is worth an estimated $100,000.

There are 200 copies of it throughout the world. Part of the series was once exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

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Andy Warhol cars exhibition starts in Austria

The exhibit in Vienna's Albertina museum includes more than 30 pictures created by Warhol shortly before his death in 1987. Works by Sylvie Fleury, Robert Longo and Vincent Szarek are also on display.

Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schroeder describes Warhol's works as fascinating and as a "colorful kaleidoscope representing the automobile's trailblazing milestones."

The exhibit - titled "Andy Warhol. Cars" - opens Thursday evening and runs until May 16, 2010.

Guns by Andy Warhol

In the early 1980's, Andy Warhol painted a variety of cult objects, including guns, knives, and crosses. Warhol rejected the idea that his work functioned as a social critic, and instead describes himself as an American artist, who is just a depiction of his environment. This description suggests that his paintings of guns were the same as his images of Campbell Soup, Marilyn Monroe or Coca-Cola, just as images of American icons.

Nevertheless, as with many of Warhol’s statements and works, there is the surface of things and then the multiple meanings below it. Gun ownership in America is very popular, particularly because it gives people a sense of security. Hollywood image and video games add to the allure of guns. The gun also, through its widespread use and availability in America, but an instrument of real and ordinary violence. This particular gun, the .32 snub-nosed pistol, is the type that Valerie Solanas used in her 1968 assassination attempt on Warhol. In his choice of such richly associative iconic objects, Warhol became a truly artful of social observers.

Buy 'Gun' print, c.1981-82 
by Andy Warhol
(14 in x 11 in)

Campbell's soup by Andy Warhol

Around 1961, Andy Warhol started painting cans of Campbell's soup, in all 32 varieties. He liked to tell people that his mother made him Campbell's soup and that's why he painted it. Warhol first exhibited his series of Campbell's soup can paintings in 1962, with the bottom of each painting resting on a shelf like a can would in a supermarket.

Warhol also apparently didn't have an order he wanted the paintings displayed in. Museum of Modern Art displays the paintings "in rows that reflect the chronological order in which (the soups) were introduced, beginning with 'Tomato' in the upper left, which debuted in 1897." 

The soup cans are probably the most recognizable images in American art, and Warhol intended it that way. He borrowed the Campbell's brand fame to help make his own; he appeared in Time in 1962 as part of the Pop revolution that was remaking art - destroying the serious, sublime aspirations of artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Warhol was doing Campbell's soup at the same time he was painting Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. In his art, Campbell's was a "star" like a movie pinup.

If you'd imagined Warhold stocking his pantry with cans of soup, then eating a can as he'd finished a painting, well it seems not. According to the Museum of Modern Art website, Warhol used a product list from Campbell's to assign a different flavor to each painting.

Buy 'Campbell's Soup I' print, 1968
by Andy Warhol
(24 in x 40 in)

Marilyn Monroe paintings by Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol painted a variety of paintings of the actress Marilyn Monroe after she committed suicide in August 1962. In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity.

Andy Warhol painted Marilyn Monroe pictures with one color: green, blue, yellow, orange turquoise. He went on silk checking her face on top. Thus, he creates a variety of styles and represent different colors. In the pictures, or she herself, multiplied in a grid or two times. After four months, the Andy Warhol painting was complete. Andy Warhol published a portfolio of his paintings of Marilyn Monroe in 1967.

Andy Warhol interest in fame inspired him to make his Marilyn Monroe paintings. Warhol admired Marilyn Monroe as a star. He was fascinated by her beauty and thought of her as a role model. In his art work, he portrayed Monroe as not only beautiful, but also dark and mysterious. Warhol invented the phrase, "fifteen minutes of fame" which means a celebrity such as Monroe catches the public's attention for a short lived period of time. Then, the media moves on to other celebrities who fascinate the world.

The Marilyn canvases were early examples of Warhol’s use of silkscreen printing, a method the artist experimented with, recalling:

In August 62 I started doing silkscreens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns.

Buy Marilyn Monroe, 1967 (hot pink) print
(25.5 in. x 28 in.)