SHOT BY WARHOL

Shot by Warhol

It wasn't until the 1970s, when he acquired a Polaroid Big Shot camera and an easy-to-use Minox 35EL camera, that Warhol fully embraced photography as a means of personal expression. Warhol thought of his photographs as two types: Polaroids, which were primarily preparatory studies for his portrait commissions; and black-and-white photographs, which formed a sort of spontaneous visual diary. Together these photographic images reveal the creative process of the artist and offer an almost voyeuristic glimpse into his life and times. Between 1976 and his untimely death in 1987, he is believed to have shot over 150,000 black-and-white negatives (at least one roll per day). In 2007, over 28,500 of his resulting black-and-white prints and color Polaroids were systematically distributed to 183 college and university art museums around the United States as part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Indiana University Art Museum was one of the institutions to receive a gift of over 150 photographs.

This website was produced in conjunction with the exhibition, Shot by Warhol, on view in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Indiana University Art Museum, March 5 – May 8, 2011. Support for this project provided by the Lucienne M. Glaubinger Endowed Fund for the Curator of Works on Paper.

Nan Brewer, the IU Art Museum's Lucienne Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper, wrote an article that appears here with permission from The Ryder magazine.

WFIU recorded an in-depth interview about the Warhol photographs with Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper Nan Brewer, linked here.

Warhol at the Indiana University Art Museum

“I told them I didn’t believe in art, that I believed in photography.”
—Andy Warhol (diary entry, August 14, 1980)

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) worked in a wide range of media. Nonetheless, a consistent thread throughout much of his work is an abiding interest in the photographic image. Warhol grew up around photography, as his older brother, John Warhola, operated a photo shop in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He played around with his family’s Kodak Brownie camera in his youth, but when he acquired a 35mm still camera in the 1960s, he found the mechanics too cumbersome and quickly abandoned it. When he wanted to use photographic material, he obtained it from popular media sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and publicity shots (or occasionally he would have someone else shoot images for him). Warhol used these appropriated images to create silkscreen matrices that he printed on a variety of supports. The Indiana University Art Museum’s collection includes several prints of iconic images from this period: a metallic silkscreen print, Presidential Seal, from the Flash–November 22, 1963 portfolio (1968); a color silkscreen piece of ephemera, Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can (from a Banner)(1968); and two color offset lithographs, Liz and Flowers (1964). Warhol also worked with a variety of photographers and filmmakers to record the activities of his famous studio space/hangout, called the Factory, and other collaborations. The IU Art Museum’s Art Sinsabaugh Archive includes fifteen “film fragments” from Ronald Nameth’s Andy Warhol’s Exploring Plastic Inevitable (EPI) with the Velvet Underground,documenting a 1966 multi-media “happening” in Chicago.

For more information or to make an appointment to see these works, please contact Nan Brewer, The Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper, 812-855-1040 or nabrewer@indiana.edu.

Warhol's life and legacy:
http://www.warholfoundation.org/legacy/biography.html

This website was produced in conjunction with the exhibition, Shot by Warhol, on view in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Indiana University Art Museum,
March 5 – May 8, 2011. Support for this project provided by the Lucienne M. Glaubinger Endowed Fund for the Curator of Works on Paper.

Web design: Jeff Hanson
Text: Nan Brewer, the IU Art Museum's Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper, with assistance from Vincent Desjardins and Barbara Wallace
Photography: Michael Cavanagh and Kevin Montague
Editing: Linda Baden and Anna Simon