Andy Warhol

It's been 25 years since Andy Warhol died, and the man who gave us the phrase, 15 minutes of fame, is still up there for artists to enjoy and follow.

Next week, he will be even more in the public gaze as his entire estate begins to be auctioned off! The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh - the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist – is exhibiting examples of Warhol’s source material for his works of art, something that should appeal to afficiandos. Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, a retrospective that will travel over two years from Singapore to Tokyo, and indicative of his huge popularity in Asia, is also under way.





Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing a show, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, which features about 45 works by Warhol plus 60 pieces by other artists inspired by him. The exhibition is structured in five thematic sections that aptly describe the world of Warhol: "Daily News: From Banality to Disaster," "Portraiture: Celebrity and Power," "Queer Studies: Shifting Identities," "Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction, and Seriality," and "No Boundaries: Business, Collaboration, and Spectacle."

As the exhibitions kick off to commemorate this important milestone, it is time to reflect on the dramatic, and enduring power of a man who lived totally in his present.

Revisiting Edvard Munch

As I was sorting through our household collection of Great Artists, cataloguing them according to the period/genre, I treated myself by putting aside some to enjoy later. Favorites such as Monet and Seurat and Lowry, but also some that I was unfamiliar with, like Whistler, Hopper, and Burra. And then, there is Edvard Munch. 


Been reading a lot about Munch lately, as he turns 150 next year, and also because of the buzz over the Sotheby sale of one of his Scream series a couple of months ago. Sharing here some insights from an article by Maya Jaggi, that I found interesting. One of the interesting bits was that Munch left his work to the city of Oslo, perhaps to prevent the Nazi government from grabbing it. 

< The Dance of Life

On the forested slopes above the Norwegian capital is a railed path whose sunset view inspired Edvard Munch’s famous vision. The “sky became blood,” he later wrote, and “I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature.” The nearby Ekeberg restaurant has a similar view over the Oslofjord. The setting recurs in other paintings. Munch was barely 30 when he first painted The Scream in 1893. He worked from memory, even in front of a landscape, imbuing it with past perceptions and emotions, painting, he wrote, “not what I see but what I saw.” An anatomist of his psyche, he wrung lifelong motifs from personal experience. But his professed aim was to “dissect what is universal in the soul.”

Munch also painted an astonishing fjord sunrise, reflecting his belief that people should remove their hats before art “as they do in church.” The series was for a competition in 1911, but controversy delayed its hanging for five years. In 1917 Richard Strauss stood entranced by The Sun before raising his baton, and Einstein lectured in its rays.

An unexpectedly joyous frieze was made for the women’s canteen of the Freia chocolate factory, just east of Grunerlokka, in 1923. The 12 bucolic scenes were reinstalled by Munch in 1934 in a wing overlooking a walled garden. This model canteen (now owned by Kraft) can be viewed by appointment. Employees in white hairnets still eat lunch under the frieze.

Read more: Edvard Munch's Oslo