Empty chairs: Andy Warhol’s interest in mass media resurges with new meaning

Venus Over Manhattan has opened an Andy Warhol show, just in time for Frieze. The exhibition of 18 paintings comes from a series from the 1960s entitled ‘Death and Disaster’.
Warhol had a well-known obsession with the media. He collected all kinds of newspapers, magazines and supermarket tabloids. As an artist, the power of ‘mass-circulated media images’ was priceless and therefore he carefully appropriated this into much of his work over the span of his career.
This particular series, produced between 1964 and 1965, was Warhol’s way of exploring ‘growing mass media’s exploitation of tragic imagery in post-war America’. And this, of course, is most relevant today in the way news and current events are covered. The images – some extreme and frightening – are still today infiltrating mass media, taking the form of riots, terrorist attacks, suicides, criminals, car, train and plane accidents and more.
With his 'Little Electric Chairs' Warhol references a news wire service from 13 January 1953 announcing the historic death sentences of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
In his essay on the series, American poet Gerard Malanga credited Warhol with saying that ‘[a]dding pretty colors to a picture as gruesome as this would change people’s perceptions of acceptance’. And so, some regard this series as among Warhol’s most important contributions to pop art. As the gallery says, ‘it reveals the banality that can attenuate even a topic as tragic as capital punishment’.
Well-known for his obsession with the media, Warhol produced the series between 1964 and 1965 to explore ‘growing mass media’s exploitation of tragic imagery in post-war America’
With ‘Little Electric Chairs’, Warhol references a news wire service from 13 January 1953, announcing the historic death sentences of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Pictured: Big Electric Chair, 1967–68
‘It reveals the banality that can attenuate even a topic as tragic as capital punishment,’ the gallery explains. Pictured: Little Electric Chair, 1964
INFORMATION
’Little Electric Chairs’ is on view until 18 June. For more details, visit Venus Over Manhattan’s website
Photography courtesy VENUS New York and Andy Romer, © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
ADDRESS
Venus Over Manhattan
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Daniel Scheffler is a storyteller for The New York Times and others. He has a travel podcast with iHeart Media called Everywhere and a Substack newsletter, Withoutmaps, where he shares all his wild ways. He lives in New York with his husband and their pup.
-
What is the future for design in Africa? Designer Hicham Lahlou shares possibilities for the continent at large
The Moroccan designer celebrates 30 years of his practice. Here he speaks from his studio in Rabat about his own career and the creative possibilities for design in Morocco and the rest of Africa
-
Philadelphia’s 'Grande Dame' reopens with a dazzling French twist
The Bellevue Hotel has been restored to its former glory through a stylish renovation by design studio Ward + Gray
-
Louis Vuitton’s duo of Osaka exhibitions celebrate the house’s deep-rooted relationship with Japan
Unfolding in Osaka this summer, ‘Visionary Journeys’ is a transporting trip into the house’s history, while ‘Yayoi Kusama – Infinity’ promises an immersion into the works of the Japanese artist, who is a longstanding Louis Vuitton collaborator
-
Architect Erin Besler is reframing the American tradition of barn raising
At Art Omi sculpture and architecture park, NY, Besler turns barn raising into an inclusive project that challenges conventional notions of architecture
-
The dynamic young gallerists reinvigorating America's art scene
'Hugging has replaced air kissing' in this new wave of galleries with craft and community at their core
-
Meet the New York-based artists destabilising the boundaries of society
A new show in London presents seven young New York-based artists who are pushing against the borders between refined aesthetics and primal materiality
-
‘Her pictures looked like pictures everybody knew were the truth’: Diane Arbus at the Armory
Matthieu Humery curates more than 400 of Arbus’ photographs at New York’s Park Avenue Armory – every picture she was known to have printed
-
Mystic, feminine and erotic: the power of Penny Slinger’s bodies as landscape
Artist Penny Slinger continues her exploration of the sacred, surreal feminine in a Santa Monica exhibition, ‘Meeting at the Horizon’
-
Out of office: the Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the week
It was a jam-packed week for the Wallpaper* staff, entailing furniture, tech and music launches and lots of good food – from afternoon tea to omakase
-
Out of office: what the Wallpaper* editors have been up to this week
This week saw the Wallpaper* team jet-setting to Jordan and New York; those of us left in London had to make do with being transported via the power of music at rooftop bars, live sets and hologram performances
-
Photographer Geordie Wood takes a leap of faith with first film, Divers
Geordie Wood delved into the world of professional diving in Fort Lauderdale for his first film