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Snite Museum of Art Announces Warhol’s Camera

The Snite Museum of Art presents Warhol’s Camera, on view September 18-November 13, 2011 in the Scholz Family Works on Paper Gallery.

The Snite Museum of Art celebrates the November 2011 residency of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Notre Dame with an exhibition dedicated to the work of Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Warhol was an important figure in the generation of post-war visual artists who challenged the division of fine art and popular imagery by incorporating photographs, mass media and commercial elements into work that came to be known as Pop Art. Warhol was one of several artists, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who further tested the traditional limits of genre through revolutionary collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Warhol & the Camera celebrates the spirit of innovation that marks the work of both Cunningham and Warhol and offers a welcome opportunity to debut highlights of the Warhol Foundation’s 2008 gift to the Snite Museum of 106 Polaroid and 49 gelatin silver print photographs.

The exhibition focuses on the importance of photography to Warhol’s Pop aesthetic and explores a variety of roles that photography played in his work: as a basis for screen prints; as a crucial step in his portrait process; and as a means to chronicle his daily life. Warhol’s use of appropriated photographs, including Electric Chair (1971), exemplifies a central tenet of the Pop aesthetic in its defiance of notions of the artist’s creativity and authority. In his later career, partly motivated by lawsuits stemming from his photographic appropriations, Warhol began to take his own pictures. He took thousands of photographs with his cameras of choice, the Polaroid Big Shot, and later the portable Minox 35 millimeter. This flood of images, including Jane Fonda (1983) and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1980) establish the centrality of photography to his process and reinforce his ability to see beauty in the most mundane elements of everyday life.

This exhibition is on view during the November performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performances in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

Jane Fonda, 1983
Andy Warhol, American, 1928-1987
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Polaroid photograph 4.25 x 3.375 inches
Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
2008.026.053

sniteartmuseum.nd.edu

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