Warhol and Cars: American Icons

Warhol and Cars: American Icons

March 6, 2011 - June 19, 2011

As one of the most iconic and influential artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol has helped to define America. His signature images of such American products and celebrities as Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor have become instantly recognizable, while challenging traditional and cherished distinctions: between fine and commercial art, the mechanical hand made, popular taste and high culture, repetition and singularity. In doing so, Warhol himself has attained a level of celebrity and public visibility unknown to most artists.

Yet despite the intense attention paid to Warhol since the time of his death, in 1987, his preoccuption with another American icon, the automobile, has been largely overlooked. The Montclair Art Museum now breaks new ground in presenting Warhol and Cars: American Icons, the firt exhibition to examine Warhol's enduring fascination with automotive vehicles as products of American consumer society. Highlighting MAM's pivotal, little known, early silkscreen painting, Twelve Cadillacs (1962), Warhol and Cars features more than 40 drawings, prints, photographs, and related archival documents on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum and private collections spanning Warhol's career from 1946 to 1986.

 

Click here to read the press release.

Image Credit: Andy Warhol (1928-87), Twelve Cadillacs, 1962, Silkscreen ink on canvas, 46 x 42 in. (116.8 x 106.7 cm), Montclair Art Museum purchase; prior bequest of James Turner and Acquisition Fund 1998.9 , © 2011 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Warhol and Cars: American Icons is made possible by generous support from The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Mandee, Annie sez, and the Judith Targan Endowment Fund for Museum Publications.  Additional support has been provided by Exhibition Angels: the Vance Wall Foundation, The Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Bobbi Brown and Steven Plofker, Bob and Bobbie Constable, Tracy Higgins and James Leitner, Jacqueline and Herb Klein, Lyn and Glenn Reiter, Toni LeQuire-Schott and Newton B. Schott, Jr., Adrian A. Shelby, Margo and Frank Walter, and Joan and Donald Zief.
 
This exhibition was selected by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as part of the American Masterpieces Series in New Jersey. American Masterpieces is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts. All Museum programs are made possible, in part, by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vance Wall Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Arts Consulting Group, and Museum Members.

Warhol and Cars: American Icons Opening

Warhol and Cars: American Icons Artworks