His Marilyn Monroe paintings and oversize soup cans are cultural icons, but in an exhibition opening Monday, New York’s Whitney Museum hopes to paint a new, more complex picture of Andy Warhol.
These days, few dare to tackle the king of pop art: he has already been the subject of hundreds of exhibitions and retrospectives.
But under the guidance of chief curator Donna De Salvo – who worked with Warhol before his death in 1987 – the modern and contemporary art museum is doing just that.
De Salvo believes America’s last Warhol retrospective – in 1989 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – “changed much of our thinking about Warhol but also left much unanswered.”
From Campbell soups to Coca-Cola, Andrew Warhola – to use his birth name – played with the icons of his time, while tirelessly documenting his own life and work, to the point of becoming a brand himself.
