It’s half a century since BMW pioneered the intersection between automotive design and fine art. The very first BMW Art Car was unveiled in 1975, the work of American sculptor Alexander Calder. The idea came from French auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulai, who convinced Jochen Neerpasch, the founder and head of BMW Motorsport, to let Calder create the livery of the BMW 3.0 CSL he was entering into that year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. Despite not finishing, Poulain’s idea set the stage for more collaborations, buoyed by a positive public reception.

The scheme was driven by a collaboration with Leo Castelli, the pioneering New York art gallerist and dealer. Castelli’s contacts brought Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol into the project to create new liveries for Poulain’s subsequent drives at Le Mans. Then in the early 1980s, the Art Car programme opened up and invited artists to work on standard product models, before returning to a racing focus in 1999. Since then, the BMW Art Car has been a dynamic expression of the company’s commitment to the arts in all its forms, ‘a perfect playground for art and design, technology and innovation, motorsport and engineering’.

To celebrate the scope and scale of this ongoing corporate commitment, BMW has released archive imagery of the works in progress, as well as announced a worldwide celebratory programme of exhibitions and displays. The BMW Art Car World Tour will roll through 2025 and 2026, taking select cars to auto shows and fairs, including Art Basel Hong Kong, the Shanghai Auto Show, Art Basel and Contemporary Istanbul. There will also be a major display at the Louwman Museum in The Hague throughout July and August 2025, featuring eight of the 20 cars.

The BMW Art Cars and their creators

Further information on the BMW Art Car Collection can be found at BMW.com

Contemporary takes on enduring American icons of design only remind us of the USA’s extraordinary and enduring creative heft. From Pharrell Williams’ fresh interpretation of the humble cowboy boot to the latest iteration of Apple's MacBook Air, and even Andy Warhol's globally recognised soup cans reserved in puzzle form, here are the American classics that keep us coming back for more.

Icons of American design

Cowboy boots by Pharrell Williams

For his sophomore collection as menswear artistic director of Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams took a trip from Paris to Virginia, uniting French savoir-faire with the pioneering spirit of the American West. Case in point: his monogrammed, golden-toed riff on the cowboy boot. Williams spoke of a desire to provide a more expansive vision of the pioneer archetype, noting that Black and Native American cowboys were some of the first to strike westwards. It was to provide a prelude of sorts to Beyoncé’s own Western epic, Cowboy Carter, which the singer gave a pre-launch tease at the 2024 Grammy Awards by turning up in a studded leather Louis Vuitton look by Williams, alongside the requisite white Stetson cowboy hat.

Boots, £6,550, by Pharrell Williams, for Louis Vuitton, louisvuitton.com

M3 MacBook Air by Apple

If there’s one device that epitomises the spirit of modern mobile creativity, it’s Apple’s classic MacBook Air. First introduced in 2008, the Air squeezed the form factor of the modern laptop into hitherto unprecedented dimensions; it was the thinnest notebook computer in the world at the time of launch and Apple’s first computer with asolid-state hard drive, although it was compromised by screen quality and power. It wasn’t until Apple started fitting its own custom silicon into its laptop line-up in 2020 that the Air really came into its own. The latest edition, the M3 MacBook Air, is the de facto choice for music, video and visual design on the move, and will handle the upcoming Apple Intelligence AI integration with ease.

M3 MacBook Air, from £1,099, by Apple, apple.com

‘Black Rainbow’ bag by Telfar

Liberian-American designer Telfar Clemens has long eschewed the confines of the fashion industry with a steadfast refusal to play by the establishment’s rules. Non-gendered and defiantly democratic, it is the Telfar shopping bag that has become symbolic of his eponymous brand’s unconventional approach. Based on the shape of the Bloomingdale’s shopping bag, the vegan-leather tote features the Telfar logo, which Clemens says he first drew while at school. Originally sold in ‘blind’ pre-order drops, with prices starting at $150 – a fraction of the price of bags from the luxury fashion houses it playfully mimics – it fast became an anti-status symbol. ‘[I want to] make an ‘it’ bag where the ‘it’ has nothing to do with domination,’ says Clemens.

‘Black Rainbow’ bag, $191, by Telfar, telfar.net

‘Akari’ lamp by Isamu Noguchi

Japanese-American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi designed the first lamp in his ‘Akari’ series in 1951 after a visit to the Japanese town of Gifu, known for its traditional paper lanterns. Handcrafting the lamp from washi paper and bamboo, Noguchi was mesmerised by the way ‘the harshness of electricity is transformed through the magic of paper back to the light of our origin – the sun – so that its warmth may continue to fill our rooms at night.’ He would go on to create many more in a variety of forms and silhouettes. Over the years, the lamps have kept their timeless charm and desirability, becoming one of the most recognisable pieces of lighting design ever created (a very loose interpretation of the concept by Ikea is among the Swedish company’s best-sellers).

‘Akari 9A’ lamp, £720, by Isamu Noguchi, for Vitra, from Aram, aram.co.uk

Air Jordan 39 sneakers by Nike

It was said that Michael Jordan could defy gravity, a feat of sportsmanship immortalised by the basketballer’s leaping silhouette, which first appeared on the third iteration of Nike’s Air Jordan high-top sneaker. Originally released in 1984, 1.5m pairs were sold in the first six weeks, far exceeding Nike’s estimates, and Jordan received a portion of the profits from every pair sold, making him one of theworld’s most bankable stars. The new Air Jordan 39, released in July, saw Nike designers Joël Greenspan and Bennett Shaw work directly with Jordan on the sleek, ergonomic sneaker, which features long panels of bouncy Nike ZoomX foam in the sole, helping professionals and amateurs alike attempt to reach its namesake’s heady heights.

Air Jordan 39 sneakers, price on request, by Nike, nike.com

‘Americana’ cars by Candylab

With the icons of automotive America mostly distant memories, it falls to the New York-based Candylab to sate our love of Detroit’s golden era. Combining hand-finished custom runs made in New York and Pennsylvania with a manufacturing facility in Ningbo, China, Candylab is a bespoke wooden modelmaker whose ethos is that toys needn’t cost the earth. Each stylised model is made fromsolid lumber sourced from managed forests in North America, brightly coloured using non-toxic paints and packaged up in sturdy paper and cardboard. And Candylab’s ‘Americana’ fleet isn’t just about the muscle car; there are also police cruisers, camper vans, beech-clad surf wagons, yellow cabs, off-roaders and many more.

‘Americana’ taxi, £25; camper, £21; pickup, £25, all by Candylab, candylabtoys.com

‘Lock’ jewellery collection by Tiffany & Co

Padlocks began as purely functional items for Tiffany & Co, which sold them as part of its homeware collections. Then, in the 1950s, padlocks began to be rethought in aesthetic terms, appearing on necklaces, brooches and key rings ,a history referenced in the release of the ‘Tiffany Lock’ collection in 2022. In these pieces, unnecessary details are set aside in favour of streamlined silhouettes. The bracelets, an elongated oval available in yellow, rose or white gold, come peppered with diamonds, or are left pure and unadorned. Taking centre stage is the padlock mechanism itself, with an opening and closing function that echoes the item’s pleasing pivot. Fresh, clean and cool, the ‘Tiffany Lock’ has become a byword for classic American jewellery design.

‘Tiffany Lock’ yellow gold bangle, £7,000, by Tiffany & Co, tiffany.com

‘1006 Navy’ chair by Emeco

Emeco’s story begins in 1944 when it was hired to make a chair using salvaged aluminium for the US Navy during World War II and, over the years, the furniture brand has evolved to become a legend in its field, continuing its focus on superior design and sustainability. Virtually indestructible, the ‘1006 Navy’ chair has remained unchanged since its inception: it is still made by hand from scrap aluminium at the Emeco factory in Hanover, Pennsylvania, with a 77-step process that includes grinding, heat-treating, anodising and brushing. The ‘1006 Navy’ chair’s origins have also inspired Emeco to further pursue sustainable furniture design practices, with a catalogue of seats made using recycled PET bottles, discarded wood and eco-concrete.

‘1006 Navy’ chair, £808, by Emeco, from Viaduct, viaduct.co.uk

Uniform by Thom Browne

Thom Browne is well known for his tailoring, which is often shrunken in proportion, and largely a shade of mid-gray. Other perennial motifs are his signature four stripes, which run around the sleeve of a shirt or across a tie, recalling American varsity wear. It makes for a simple uniform for Thom Browne devotees, who simply follow his style diktats: he favours an unironed shirt (with an undone top button), tucked in and worn with a grey suit, narrow tie and white pocket square. Such a sharply defined aesthetic – which can verge into the surreal in his runway shows – has seen him become one of American fashion’s best-known figures, taking over from Tom Ford as chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) in 2023.

Briefcase, £8,260; shirt, £440; tie, £190, all by Thom Browne, thombrowne.com

CK One fragrance by Calvin Klein

If the 1990s were to be encapsulated in a fragrance, it would be the shimmering citrussy tones of Calvin Klein’s CK One, first released in 1994 and a bestsellerever since. Marking an olfactory shift from the heady French perfumes that dominated the previous decade, it would capture the stripped-back minimalism and raw sensuality of the era, designed for both men’s and women’s skin, then a marketing first (‘one for all’, ran its slogan). Its accompanying Steven Meisel-shot campaign, featuring Kate Moss and a bevy of underwear- and denim-clad models, remains an enduring and oft-reproduced piece of fashion imagery, while the bottle itself – frosted white glass with a metal screw top and stamped CK One logo – remains an emblem of 1990s product design.

CK One fragrance, £77, by Calvin Klein, calvinklein.com

Soup can paintings by Andy Warhol

Love them or loathe them, Andy Warhol’s soup cans cracked the conversation around modern art wide open on their exhibition at LA’s Ferus Gallery in 1962. Warhol, who wished to celebrate the international distribution of homogenous products as a sign of democracy, replicated the red and white Campbell’s soup cans that he had for his lunch every day using the precise screenprinting technique that quickly became synonymous with the Pop Art movement. The soup cans became a motif for Western capitalism and rampant consumer culture, forever cementing the links between advertising and art – but the Campbell’s Soup Company, at least, was pleased. In 1964, it commissioned a classic tomato soup for its retiring board chairman.

Andy Warhol soup cans puzzle set, £24 for three, from Amazon, Amazon.com

Baseball cap by Polo Ralph Lauren

There are few things more synonymous with American style than Polo Ralph Lauren. Adorned with the ‘pony and rider’ motif, the collections have come to encapsulate a vision of American ease, reflected in breezy, aspirational campaigns where models frolic amid Edenic landscapes, often with the shimmering Atlantic Ocean beyond. The Polo symbol would also later be adopted by America’s suburban subcultures, from skaters to hip-hop artists and, across the pond, the Britpop stars of the 1990s. Recent seasons have seen the Polo Ralph Lauren pony motif become ubiquitous once again, part of a growing preppy revival – not least the classic, all-American baseball cap, which is proof of the old maxim that a classic never goes out of style.

Baseball cap, £55, by Polo Ralph Lauren, ralphlauren.com

This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available to download free when you sign up to our daily newsletter, in print on newsstands from 4 July, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘There is something investigatory and playful about motor racing. It’s a form of sport, a form of imagination, a form of creativity. It’s an important place in the imagination. I was fascinated to play in that place,’ says the Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu.

The artist is referring to the latest BMW Art Car, the twentieth (and first ever hybrid model) in the illustrious initiative which began in 1975 when racing driver Hervé Poulain invited his friend, the artist Alexander Calder, to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL which was subsequently raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. 

The series has since seen work by some of the major names in twentieth and twenty-first century art, including David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Cao Fei and Jeff Koons, with spin-off works and limited editions being added to the mix in recent years. The primary work is always a racing car, and always a one-off.

For this project, Mehretu has transformed the new BMW M Hybrid V8 racecar into a truly dynamic work of art. Her staring point was her monumental painting Everywhen – currently on view at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice as part of the artist’s retrospective – which loosely informed the colour and form vocabulary on the surface of this car.

Everywhen was inspired by a photograph of the events in Washington on 6 January 2021 and the onslaught on Capitol Hill. With her thought processes stirred by the lockdown, Mehretu saw the opportunity of working with a dynamic three-dimensional moving machine as an opportunity to look afresh at the painting. She speaks of her Art Car metaphorically blasting through the painting, breathing in its energy with the idea of blur and the glitch as a symbol of movement and speed.

‘I went to see the race at Daytona, and the experience was overwhelming,’ she says. ‘Conceptually I imagined seeing it go through a painting and I thought of how the car inhales the painting. Then once the car is transported through the portal of the painting it becomes something else. It was an exciting idea to take a painting that exists but remixing it on a car, in ways that means taking some of the painting apart and relaying it on surfaces and in other areas, chopping up elements and mirroring that in different ways.’

The abstract visual forms we see on the car’s surfaces come from digitally altered photographs, which are superimposed in several layers of dot grids, neon-coloured veils and the black markings characteristic of Mehretu’s work. ‘The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting. I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car. Even the grille ‘kidneys’ of the car inhaled the painting.’ Meanwhile, Mehretu worked with 3D mapping to transfer the motifs to the contours of the car, with its elaborate aerodynamic forms tailored for the Le Mans race.

‘After I saw the car race, what became interesting to me a is how the designers of the car also design the wrap and the way the car appears with the M logo,’ Mehretu continues, ‘So, when the car is still the logo appears totally shattered in red, black, white and blue, and yet when the car moves fast on a track the emblem comes to life.’

Mehretu set out to break this down and do the exact opposite; when the car is moving it is a full blur, but when it comes to a standstill you see the digitisation and animation of the marks and glitch and vibration that contributed to the process, demonstrating that the car itself has had an experience. ‘When in standstill you can see the painting, but when it’s moving, it’s a pure blur where you can see some of the marks in motion.’

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu moved to the US with her family as a child and now lives and works between New York City and Berlin. Space, movement and energy are central motifs in the artist’s work. Her practice in painting, drawing and printmaking is imbued with socio-political themes, engaging with other artworks, and is in conversation with music, media, and politics.

Mehretu was unanimously selected by an independent jury of international museum directors when the selection process began six years ago. ‘They wholeheartedly embraced Julie,’ says Thomas Girst, global head of cultural engagement at BMW. ‘I remember (Nigerian curator and writer) Okwui Enwezor saying at the time Julie would create a car that translates ‘dynamism within a form’. And that is what she created. To have her be the latest art car artist is an absolute dream come true for me personally. Her car is the greatest edition to the series I could possibly think of.’

The BMW collaboration also includes a joint commitment to a series of PanAfrican Translocal media workshops for filmmakers to tour various African cities in 2025 and 2026, concluding with a major exhibition at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. The overall vision is to provide a forum for artists to develop new pathways towards a just civic future in their respective communities.

Mehretu believes the BMW Art Car is only complete once the Le Mans race is over. ‘The whole project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible. I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit,’ she says. ‘I am thinking of it as something that will race. It’s a performative painting.’ 

She continues, ‘I’m interested in how we experience paintings and visual media, and how they evolve in front of us and have been part of our cultural language for a very long time. This work comes out of my practice but it’s doing something else. It is rethinking. It’s the first time I’ve remixed a painting in this way. I don’t think of it as just a rolling sculpture, or an artwork, but a car that will do a 24-hour race.’

On 15 June BMW Motorsport drivers Sheldon van der Linde (RSA), Robin Frijns (NED) and René Rast (GER) will enter the twentieth BMW Art Car into the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, bearing starting number 20 at the Circuit de la Sarthe. 

For more information on the BMW Art Car Series visit BMW.com

Richard Bernstein’s mixed-media covers for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine embodied a bold technicality, capturing the celebrity culture zeitgeist of 1970s and 1980s New York.

His portraits of stars, including Cher, Stevie Wonder, Fran Lebowitz, Mick Jagger and Grace Jones, are now the subject of an exhibition at NeueHouse Madison Square. It is a celebration of both the New York art scene and Bernstein’s process, who turned each cover around in two weeks, translating the analog photography into a mixed-media style that utilised pencil, collage, gouache and airbrush. 

The work was the culmination of a creative partnership, and friendship with Warhol. ‘Andy once said ‘He [Richard] makes everyone look so famous,’’ says Rory Trifon, president of the Estate of Richard Bernstein and his nephew. ‘They first met in 1965 at Richard’s solo exhibition in New York when David Bourdon of the Village Voice introduced them to each other. Andy loved Richard’s work and how handsome Richard was so their friendship blossomed from there.’

Upon the creation of Interview magazine in 1969, Warhol used black and white movie stills for the covers, something he continued until asking Bernstein to take over in 1972. Between 1972 and 1989, he created 189 portraits from the silver gelatin prints artists including Greg Gorman, Mathew Rolston and Albert Watson would supply him with after a photoshoot. 

‘Andy Warhol and [Interview magazine editor] Bob Colacello were responsible for choosing the cover subjects for Interview,’ adds Trifon. ‘The brand identity was this hip, glamorous mix of high and low that worked incredibly well; featuring directors, designers, political figures, rock stars, actors, artists, writers, American socialites, titled Europeans, Latin playboys, you name it. Not only were these stars the hottest at the time, but they were also beautiful and glamorous. I believe that glamour was of utmost importance to Andy. 

‘The curated works at NeueHouse perfectly showcase the tapestry of talent. It’s an eclectic group but it works so well together; from Cher to hockey star Ron Duguay, from socialite and member of Warhol’s entourage Barbara Allen to Annie Lennox, and from Isabella Rossellini to Joan Rivers. The glue that holds these people together is Richard’s artistry and the deity-like glow he gives to each one.’

The Interview Magazine Covers, 1972-1989: Richard Bernstein’s Portraits for
Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine on show until 30 June 2024 at NeueHouse Madison Square

neuehouse.com

In 1991, a year following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, Esther Mahlangu painted the BMW 525i Art Car with her distinctive Ndebele designs and bold colours. She was the first woman, and the first African artist, to contribute to the celebrated project, joining artists from the canon – Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

In the townships, where Mahlangu grew up and lives today, these sportier BMW models were nicknamed ‘Igusheshe’ to roughly mean ‘it grinds’ in Zulu as a note to their distinctive engine note. These fast cars were aspirational products, admired by all and certainly not attainable for most. ‘I painted the car like a wall, and for the Ndebele people, if you begin to paint a wall, it means you’re announcing either a wedding or a celebration,’ recalls Mahlangu.

‘Then I knew I was good at painting: Esther Mahlangu’

The BMW 525i Art Car takes centre stage at ‘Then I knew I was good at painting: Esther Mahlangu’, the artist’s first retrospective, held at the Iziko Museums of South Africa in Cape Town (it’s also referenced in the car maker’s Frieze LA 2024 reveal, the BMW i5 Flow NOSTOKANA). ‘Back then, to see a BMW painted in Ndebele design was a huge thing for our communities,’ explains the exhibition curator Nontobeko Ntombela. ‘For Mahlangu to have turned this car into her art suddenly highlights these aspirations in ways that co-opt it between the African and Western.’ She believes the Mahlangu BMW Art Car encapsulates the tensions that exist in South Africa – the tensions of the modern and rural, technological and the handmade. 

Mahlangu is a national treasure. Almost 90, with her vibrant traditional Ndebele dress, her presence is as striking as her art. Born in 1935 in Middelburg, in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa, her mother and grandmother taught the young Mahlangu the art of Ndebele mural painting. 

Practised by the Ndebele people (primarily based in South Africa and Zimbabwe), Ndebele art is typically hand-painted using natural pigments, with acrylic paints adopted by contemporary artists such as Mahlangu for their wider colour choice and longevity. The vibrant geometric motifs associated with the art are painted on various surfaces, on walls, houses, clothing, pottery and textiles. And they offer both aesthetic and cultural readings with pattern and colour carrying symbolism, often reflecting the cultural identity, social status, and spiritual beliefs within the community. 

‘I would continue to paint on the house when they left for a break. When they came back, they would say: What have you done, child? Never do that again. After that, I started drawing on the back of the house, and slowly, my drawings got better and better until they finally asked me to come back to the front of the house. Then I knew I was good at painting,’ wrote Mahlangu, in a quote that has informed the exhibition title.

Mahlangu’s work is rooted in the centuries-long tradition of Ndebele art, yet hers is a unique approach to colour and shape that flows seamlessly between indigenous designs and contemporary art. She was one of the first to translate the Ndebele style of mural painting to canvas. Chicken feathers are her brushes of choice (although some of her latter wall-size artworks do involve paintbrushes), and instead of making preliminary sketches for her designs, Mahlangu works straight from the imagination. And she refrains from working in a conventional studio, preferring the more modest setting of her hometown, often laying out the canvases on the floor, and employing her family members as studio assistants. 

Mahlangu’s precise geometric shapes and abstract forms are created without the aid of rulers or masking tape, and the thick black lines that are a defining feature of her work echo traditional Ndebele beadwork. There are other signals that set her work apart: motifs of the razorblade for cutting hair appears throughout her work, as do streetlamps, painted at a time when electricity was not available to her community.

‘Seeing these appear in her murals shifts the so-called traditional practice,’ says Ntombela. The curator wanted to capture Mahlangu’s sense of agency, tell her story from her lens: a fearless artist with self-belief at a time when the art world was not open to her. ‘Naming the exhibition after a childhood scenario is important as it is testimony to Mahlangu’s defying spirit and foresight,’ she explains. ‘It is radical that Mahlangu would see herself as an artist when only ten years old, and in the 1940s South Africa. It tells us about her self-belief, how she understood her significance and talent.’

Mahlangu first came to the attention of an international audience in the group show ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ held at the Centre Pompidou in 1989. In Paris, Mahlangu created a reconstruction of her house to demonstrate the possibility of bringing her design onto an artificial surface, as well as transporting her culture into a global context. For the artist, it was, and is, critical to place Ndebele art into the Western art canon as a way of preserving its history. To show the significance of this moment, the Iziko Museums features a scaled-down model of the Pompidou house. 

Most striking, perhaps, are her wall-size canvas works created from the early 1990s, which hang in Iziko Museums’ final gallery. Canvas allowed Mahlangu to explore colour and design in new ways. Crucially, it made it possible for her work to travel and enter private collections, where most of her artwork was sourced for this show. 

Exhibitions of Ndebele art can often be about the collective, leaving out the individual voice. Curator Ntombela, a lecturer at Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, believes this may explain why South Africa has struggled to show Mahlangu’s work and why her artworks are mainly collected outside of the country. She says there is an interesting relationship between South Africans and Esther Mahlangu. ‘This is a person who is celebrated around the world but we see as doing something that is everyday. In dealing with this I had to do a lot of un-learning and write a story from a contemporary position, and from a different kind of art historical engagement.’

Ntombela believes Mahlangu’s approach shows how indigeneity can lead to generative, expansive and creatively exciting art; how practices of culture can embody a modernist approach and intellectual processes of making. ‘She doesn’t become the sole representative of an otherwise collective or communal culture. Rather, she inhabits a complex nexus between tradition and modernity in all its constant reinterpretations. It is with this unique practice that Mahlangu begins to expand and trouble the canon and its conventions,’ she says.

‘Painting has always been a part of me,’ writes Mahlangu. ‘I cannot separate it from myself, and neither would I want to.’

‘Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting: Esther Mahlangu’, supported by the BMW Group, will be at the Iziko Museums of South Africa until 11 August 2024, after which it will begin a global tour, stopping first at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg before moving to the US in early 2026. BMW is working with Esther Mahlangu on a project to be revealed at Frieze LA 2024.

iziko.org.za

Exploring the fruitful relationship between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, ‘Basquiat x Warhol. Painting 4 Hands’ is at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 28 August 2023, building on the venue’s 2018 show, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat’.

Curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, in partnership with Olivier Michelon, curator at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the exhibition encompasses more than 80 paintings jointly signed by both artists. It is a snapshot of the duo’s productive period between 1983 and 1985, which resulted in 160 paintings created together, including some of their largest works. The pieces are shown alongside photographs, documents and work from other artists, including Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Lady Pink, Futura 2000, LA II, and Kenny Scharf. 

‘Basquiat x Warhol. Painting 4 Hands’

An exploration of the stylistic influences both artists had on each other’s work is at the heart of the retrospective, which was originally sparked by a Basquiat self-portrait, showing himself with Warhol, that was admired by the president of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault. Created in 1982, it marked the duo’s first meeting, arranged by Warhol’s gallerist Bruno Bischofberger. 

Says Arnault, ‘In New York, [Bischofberger] regularly arranged for Andy Warhol to meet young artists he also represented, and on 4 October 1982, he introduced Jean-Michel Basquiat to Andy Warhol, whose work at the time largely centred on portraits. Warhol often finished these meetings with a painting of the person he had met. This time, however, he found the tables turned when Basquiat abruptly declined to join them for lunch and went directly to his studio to paint this double portrait, presenting himself as an equal to his elder. Two hours later, his assistant brought the barely dry painting to Warhol. “Oh, I’m so jealous! He’s faster than me,” the artist exclaimed.’

The subsequent collaborations were subject to a relaxed choreography, with the artists creating together and responding to each other’s pieces in a way of working Keith Haring later termed a ‘conversation’. With one artist taking over from the other during sessions, the influence of both is naturally felt in these works, from Basquiat’s use of silkscreen in his polyphonic art to Warhol’s re-embracing of brushwork.

‘Basquiat x Warhol. Painting 4 Hands’ traces this journey, beginning with the original portrait that marked the start of their collaboration, Dos Cabezas, and proceeding through to explicit examples of their partnership. Included is Olympic Rings, painted by hand by Warhol and featuring Basquiat’s interventions, such as his blackening of some of the rings and making a black face visible, a theme seen throughout. Work considers the integration of the African-American community into the north American culture narrative, contemplated again in African Masks, thought to be a reworking of the 1984-85 New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ‘“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’.

The pieces are shown alongside works from other artists in a real-time replication of the environment, in often playful riffs on contemporary culture. Futura 2000 and Kenny Scharf’s partnership muses on the creativity in collaboration, while photographer Michael Halsband’s series, made at Basquiat’s request, depicts the two artists as boxers. A context is provided by Jenny Holzer and Lady Pink’s spraypainted canvas, and Keith Haring and Warhol’s 1985 collaboration, both joyfully indicative of downtown New York’s 1980s art scene. 

‘Basquiat x Warhol. Painting 4 Hands’ 5 April – 28 August 2023, Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Bois de Boulogne, Paris

fondationlouisvuitton.fr

Milan's Expo is still one month away, but the very first pavilion dedicated to the universal exhibition - and the only one that will be located in the city centre -  has opened its doors inside Milan's Triennale Design Museum. Entitled 'Arts & Foods: Rituals since 1851', the exhibition takes on the Expo's overarching theme of sustainable food but peers at it with an artistic lens. And the results are, in a word, delectable.

Curated by Germano Celant, the prolific artistic director of the Prada Foundation and curator of Milan's Fondazione Aldo Rossi, the exhibition sprawls across the entire 7,000 square metres of the museum, including its outdoor garden. It's like a never-ending feast of food-related objects, tools, paintings, installations, rooms and ambiences from 1851 to the present.

The first room of the exhibition, dedicated to the period between 1851 and 1948, is the most densely packed, cohesively designed and powerfully conceived. It features a fascinating mix of antique cooking tools, kitchen furniture and butcher stations to real Florentine bars from the early 20th century that have been painstakingly reconstructed, bottle-by-bottle. A magnificent collection of antique silverware, loaned by Milan's famous G. Lorenzi cutlery company, is on show, as are thoughtful portraits of chefs by Monet and Manet and an array of mid-century kitchen accessories.

Other rooms are dedicated to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as well as to contemporary art's dealings with food. It's a tribute to Celant's profile that he's managed to wrangle top works by major artists such as Andy Warhol ('The Last Supper' and his infamous Campbell's soup cans), Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Tom Sachs, Marc Quinn and Urs Fischer (whose 'Bread House' smells just a little bit stale after nearly 10 years of circulation), even though their assembly makes less impact than the first historical room. No matter; Paul McCarthy's giant, inflatable ketchup bottle, which has been planted in the centre of the Triennale's lush park like a plastic skyscraper, makes up for it.

Also noteworthy is Gaetano Pesce's site-specific installation (the only one in the whole museum) which features giant pieces of kitchenware on a glass floor along with a group of actors chatting, cooking and fighting (what kitchen hasn't seen that?), all visible by nosy viewers looking up from the floor beneath.

This ambitious exhibit shines the spotlight on Milan's Triennale, shaking up this sometimes sleepy institution just in time for the Expo. Not only is the green garden in full aperitivo action but it also has water in its fountains for the first time in 50 years, thanks to the restoration of Giorgio de Chirico's 'Bagni Misteriosi'.  In tandem with the brimming activity is a proper - and long overdue - restaurant opening up on the museum's first floor that features a balcony overlooking the park.

ADDRESS

Triennale di Milano
Viale Alemagna 6
Milan 20121

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Andy Warhol is one of the most disseminated, duplicated, misinterpreted, fridge-magneted artists of all time. We’ve all heard many of the stories ad nauseam: The Factory, the 15 minutes, the Brillo, the Campbells, the Marilyns and the Elvises. Andy Warhol is everywhere. Well, the Andy Warhol we think is Andy Warhol.

Almost exactly 35 years since the famed pop artist died, Netflix has released The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new documentary that scratches beneath the surface of the artist’s enigmatic life and work. Ryan Murphy’s six-part series is steered by the best-selling book of the same name, compiled by editor Pat Hackett via a series of transcribed calls with the artist over more than a decade. 

Warhol had a vision of the world that ended up fashioning an entirely new one, where celebrities were icons, profundity masqueraded as shallowness and mass-produced consumerism was high art. Andy Warhol was misunderstood. But this misunderstanding was engineered, perpetuated by the artist through artfully deployed red herrings surrounding his sexuality, approach to work and depth of thought – this is the Warhol mystique, and it remains insatiable. 

The Andy Warhol Diaries – tender and mesmerising – lifts the curtain on Warhol’s ever-fascinating (and indistinguishable) life, work and loves, told in his own voice (well, a specially-programmed AI version – it seems the artist finally got his wish ‘to be a machine’). 

Through interviews with friends such as Debbie Harry and Rob Lowe, and artists Glenn Ligon, Jamie Wyeth and Julian Schnabel, it highlights Warhol’s prophetic view of culture as we now know it, drenched in celebrity, self-obsession and image-saturation, but also increasingly fluid views on sexuality and creative collaboration. 

Three contemporary artists inspired by Andy Warhol 

Glenn Ligon

American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon first saw Warhol’s work on a high school trip to Soho, New York. Although now one of the leading voices of his generation, at 16, becoming an artist wasn’t yet on the cards. ‘I don’t think I knew what that work was about, but somehow I knew it was important. It seemed fun in a way. It was glamorous too,’ Ligon says in The Andy Warhol Diaries. ‘Seeing Warhol somehow triggered some desire. So even in my 16-year-old brain, I knew I was seeing something that was hugely powerful. A kind of way forward.’ 

Ligon’s much-cited essay Pay It No Mind, appears in the catalogue for the 2018 Whitney Museum show ‘Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again’. It’s a critical examination of Warhol’s 1975 series Ladies and Gentlemen, which features almost two hundred portraits of transgender women of colour. ‘Did Warhol know any ordinary Black people’? Ligon asks, going on to question the liberties Warhol took in depicting these individuals. In spite of his criticism, Ligon has noted his appreciation for Warhol’s work, partly in deceptive depth as an artist, and his ‘genius’ use of colour. In 2000, he explored the force of colour to staggering effect in the series Colouring, for which children were asked to colour pictures of Black icons in 1970s-era colouring books. Without understanding their historical gravity, the children deployed colour freely. In Malcolm X, the Civil Rights leader is depicted with a white face and wearing lipstick, blusher and blue eye shadow.

Deborah Kass

The flat, pop-coloured shapes, the grids of familiar faces, the variations on a colour scheme; Deborah Kass’ early work has Warhol’s visual language running through its veins. But there’s a twist, an important one. Kass focused on the deft appropriating and reworking of signature styles of leading 20th-century male artists. Part searing critique, part homage, her interest was in confronting the glaring omission of leading women in art history, and in society more broadly. 

In 1992, Kass began her ‘Warhol Project’, in which she subverted the pop artist’s ubiquitous celebrity paintings, revising these groupings with self-portraits and images of her own heroines, such as Gertrude Stein, Barbra Streisand and Cindy Sherman. 

Blue Deb, at first glance, resembles a piece from Warhol’s 1960s series ‘Liz’ depicting the actress Elizabeth Taylor. But this painting, like many others, outwits the viewer’s complacency towards Warhol’s work – inimitable he may be, but he’s not exempt from reinterpretation. 

By drawing on, and rewording the visual language of the past, Kass asks us to consider an alternative storyline in 20th-century art, in which the work of female artists was iconised as much as men’s, and the ‘tragic muses’ had autonomy. As she told filmmaker John Waters in 2007, ‘It’s always been my impulse to use art history as almost a ready-made.’

Jeff Koons

Koons has made a USP from hoovering up art history – executed in literal terms with his 1980s vacuum cleaner readymades, and in a Duchampian vein, revising it into something entirely new. 

Through Koons’ cut, pasted and reimagined motifs from pop culture and art history, we can identify the parallels between Warhol’s time and ours; the mass-consumerist, voyeuristic, self-obsessed banality reflected in, and often on the surface of his work. Like Warhol, it’s not so much about the artist, but about us. 

On the face of it, the parallels between Koons and Warhol are easy to draw: they are both Pennsylvania natives, they both work in

visual hyperbole, in liberal depictions of sex, flowers, celebrity, have mainstream appeal and mask profundity with banality. But Koons has only openly referenced Warhol in one piece: Hulk Elvis I (2007), in which the Marvel character Hulk is positioned in the same stance as Warhol’s Double Elvis (1963), itself a riff on a publicity still for the 1960 film Flaming Star.

‘Pâté for the Cat’. ‘Caviar with the Shar'. ‘Tuna Fish Disaster’. Just some of the intriguingly (if not invitingly) titled dishes gracing Tate Modern's menu from March 2020. Created by head chef of Level 9 restaurant Jon Atashroo, ‘Flavours from "The Factory"' is inspired by American artist Andy Warhol, whose life and work is the focus of this year's blockbuster Tate Modern exhibition. It's the first time the institution has exhibited Warhol in depth in two decades.

The artist had a curious relationship with food. ‘I was particularly interested in the social pressures Warhol felt when eating out, along with food as a recurring motif in his work and life,' Atashroo explains. ‘My menu is based around this whilst incorporating a number of culinary anecdotes I uncovered during my research.'

It's widely known, for example, that Warhol had an insatiable sweet tooth. He was a fan of fruit (he particularly cherished cherries), opulent desserts, and little else. Atashroo's menu features four sweets, designed for sharing, including the artist's favoured breakfast Kellogg's Corn Flakes (which he is known to have eaten when he woke up in the early afternoon, and immortalised in his 1964 installation piece of the same name). In his signature style – pairing delicious ingredients with unconventional techniques – Atashroo has infused the milky cereal into a light pana cotta.

The chef keeps things light with a witty savoury menu that captures Warhol's indifference to conventional eating. ‘Tuna Fish Disaster' – inspired by the artist's 1963 silkscreen print depicting the story of two ladies who died from a tainted can of tuna; while the Edie Beale-esque ‘Pâté for the Cat’ – a reference to a quote stating that Warhol's ‘hairdresser's cat ate his leftover pâté at least twice per week.'

You can dine like Warhol (and his hairdresser's cat) during the exhibition's season-long run in the museum's Level 9 restaurant. But if ‘Tuna Fish Disaster' doesn't take your fancy, perhaps Warhol's Favourite Frozen Hot Chocolate will, also available throughout Tate Modern's cafés.

INFORMATION

tate.org.uk

‘I'm fascinated with what light does to architecture,’ says Peter Marino, swaddled in his signature leather — a taut vest, knee-pad adorned trousers and hat pulled down far over his pair of practically opaque aviator sunglasses. ‘What it does to sculptures, textiles, people.’

Marino is sitting, somewhat anachronistically, given the look, in a sumptuously silk-damask-lined room, beneath a Murano glass chandelier, in an ornately carved wooden throne that looks as if it’s lived in this particular palazzo since the day it was built. We’re in Venice, not far from San Marco Square, in the headquarters and family home of Rubelli, the fifth generation textiles company known for its Italian-made upholstery fabrics and interior furnishings.

But only the uninitiated might consider Marino out of place. Though he arrived in Venice to launch his first collaboration with Rubelli, his history with the city stretches much farther back.

Marino’s devotion to Venice was sparked two decades ago when the former Andy Warhol collaborator was commissioned to renovate an apartment on the Grand Canal. ‘That’s when I first fell in love with it,' he recalls affectionately, speaking with Rubelli CEO Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli.

Twenty years later, and many trips back, he holds the position of president of Venetian Heritage, a non-profit organisation that seeks to restore the left-in-disrepair art and antiquities that populate the city in droves. Since forming, Venetian Heritage has contributed to restoration of the Gothic silver altarpiece in the Church of San Salvador, the façades of the Church of Gesuiti and the Church of San Zaccaria, as well as three marble sculptures by Antonio Rizzo at the Palazzo Ducale, where he sprinted to for the unveiling of directly after presenting the collection.

So, when Rubelli approached Marino to collaborate on the project, all the pieces were already in place. ‘You have a city that has a unique light because of all the water,’ Marino describes of the inspiration for the collection, which was designed to mimic the glimmer of sunlight dancing on the canals. Alongside Rubelli’s team of expert weavers and textile designers, Marino narrowed in on a series of undulating patterns in silk jacquard, whose colours — a palette of pale pinks, glossy creams, ice blues — were plucked straight from a Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painting.

‘I want light in all of my work, and the light on the water in the canals makes me absolutely crazy with joy,’ Marino proclaims of his love for the floating city, ‘I could spend the rest of my life sitting looking at it.’

INFORMATION

petermarino.art

rubelli.com

Bastian has unveiled its first international outpost in Mayfair’s Davies Street, coinciding with the Berlin-based gallery’s 30th anniversary. Taking up residence in a 20th-century mansion block, the London space helmed by Aeneas Bastian (son of founders Céline and Heiner Bastian) has been renovated by David Chipperfield Architects. The firm previously designed Bastian’s Berlin gallery on Am Kupfergraben, which opened in 2007 and has recently been donated to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

The inaugurating exhibition presents a series of 60 Polaroid portraits by Andy Warhol of his illustrious coterie, some of which have not been shown previously. These casual instant pictures were an integral – if overlooked – dimension of Warhol’s practice, forming the basis of his paintings, drawings and silkscreens. The artist was partial to Polaroid’s Big Shot camera: launched in 1971 specifically for shooting portraits, it has since garnered a cult-like status in spite of its cumbersome size and rigid unpracticality.

Still, this eccentric device seemed appeal to an equally eccentric artist, who turned his lens on the likes of Joseph Beuys, Paloma Picasso, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Jean-Michel Basquiat among others through the 1970s up until his death in 1987. ‘My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person,’ he once said. Looming large over his star-studded inner circle at Bastian is a fittingly supersized portrait of Warhol himself.

Warhol’s photography is having a moment: never-before-seen photographs and filmography by the pop art pioneer are going on show at Casa Perfect in Beverly Hills from 15 February, while Brookyn gallery BlackBook’s current showcase features portraits of art, music, and fashion royalty. Last year, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center published a trove of over 100,000 unseen photographs acquired from The Andy Warhol Foundation. 

INFORMATION

‘Andy Warhol: Polaroid Pictures’ is on view from 2 February – 13 April. For more information, visit the Bastian website

ADDRESS

Bastian
8 Davies Street
London W1K 3DW

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There’s a special synergy when icons of the world of culture meet – but it’s not always obvious how you get in the room.

When British photographer David McCabe arrived in Connecticut at Philip Johnson’s famed The Glass House in 1964 to shoot Andy Warhol, he couldn’t find the front door. Trying to locate an entrance in the the minimalist structure, with its tricks of the light, endless transparency and reflection, McCabe took a fortuitous turn that lead to an unexpectedly intimate encounter with Warhol. 

‘It must have been about nine in the morning. We stumbled upon the guesthouse and it had this huge porthole type window. And I look in and there’s Andy, in bed. My first reaction was to step back – I felt like I was invading his privacy. But he saw me, and he grabbed his shades and put them on and sat up in bed, very regally draped with a satin sheet.' McCabe says, talking on the phone from New York. ‘I said screw it, I’m gonna shoot!'

McCabe had photographed Warhol on countless occasions before then, since he’d been hired by the artist to document a year in his life – but until The Glass House, always ‘at night, in clubs or in galleries, dimly lit places, pretty challenging situations. But here the light was just beautiful – it was a very easy shoot for me. I’d never been in an environment like that before. If I could design a photo studio, it would be just like that.'

That day McCabe would also capture what is now one of the definitive photographs of Warhol, gazing out of The Glass House, still wearing his shades, but now dressed, in a slick suit and tie. The photographs were not directed, McCabe says, and he simply captured the intensity of the characters who gathered at The Glass House, including Johnson’s then partner David Whitney. ‘I was just like a fly on the wall – well actually, there aren’t really any walls!'

It’s that momentous image that inspired designer Thom Browne’s latest campaign for a Golf Collection, photographed by Micaiah Carter and featuring friends of the brand, and McCabe himself – playing the role of the late Johnson. The limited-edition offering follow Browne's Tennis Collection, and features an energetic array of Argyle and tartan knitwear and tailoring, and pompom-detail sweatsuits inspired by vintage golf club covers. ‘I prefer to be on my side of the camera, quite frankly!' McCabe jokes. It has been 54 years since he was at the Glass House. ‘In a way nothing had changed.'

‘It was a very nostalgic experience for me to recollect my impressions as a younger man – and then to be surrounded by all these creative people, and Thom’s amazing outfits…' The world-famous image of a musing, elegant Warhol – one of McCabe’s most enduring and celebrated pictures from the time he spent with the artist – has also been recreated for the collection’s campaign, and we think it's a hole in one.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Thom Browne website and the David McCabe website

Andy Warhol once said, ‘My idea of a good picture is one of a famous person doing something unfamous.’ It’s a sentiment that couldn’t be more apparent in a trove of over 130,000 photographic exposures made by the artist from 1976 until his death in 1987.

Acquired by Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center from The Andy Warhol Foundation in 2014, the collection of 3,600 contact sheets and corresponding negatives is set to go on show at Cantor at the end of September. Despite shooting a roll of film or more a day, Warhol only printed under a fifth of the photographs he took. The exhibition will be the first time many of these images of Warhol’s famous social circle will be seen by the public.

The pictures satiate our voyeuristic appetite for celebrities and artists with their guard down, with snapshots of young artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and stars like Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli, and Dolly Parton. Look carefully and you’ll also find candid photographs of Debbie Harry, Nancy Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Truman Capote.

‘Whether commenting on sex, money, physical appearance, or social standing, the artist sized up his friends and acquaintances, as well as himself, with merciless precision,’ says Richard Meyer, who has curated the show with fellow Stanford professor Peggy Phelan. ‘This exhibition allows viewers to experience Warhol’s photography in a depth and detail never before possible.’

‘Contact Warhol: Photography Without End’ will also trace the artist’s fascination with the gay culture of the 1970s and 80s. Photographs of drag queens and Fire Island parties will feature alongside the artist's rarely-seen, sexually explicit images. Photographs of the artist’s boyfriend, Jon Gould – an executive at Paramount Studios who died as a result of AIDS in 1986 – will also be exhibited.

Opening in tandem with the exhibition is a digitisation project helmed by Cantor project archivist Amy DiPasquale, which will make the centre’s collection of Warhol’s photographic work available to the public. The archive of contact sheets and negatives will searchable through an online database on the Stanford University Libraries system, and on the Cantor website by the end of the year.

INFORMATION

‘Contact Warhol: Photography Without End’ is on view 28 September – 6 January. For more information, visit the Cantor Arts Center website

ADDRESS

Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center
328 Lomita Drive
Stanford CA 94305

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Football has many guises. It is a pastime where schoolboys scrape knees in a courtyard; a tear-jerking symbol of national pride; a multi-billion dollar industry with corporate interest; a global franchise with a zealot-like devotion to the athletes – the list goes on. And yet, no matter what form it takes, the sport still embodies a common vocabulary, uniting people from different cultures and nations.

The show ‘The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art’, on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) until 2 September, explores football’s many definitions. Overlapping with the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, the exhibition investigates soccer’s role in art through the works – including photography, sculpture, and painting – of more than 30 artists such as Andy Warhol, Maria Lassnig, and Antoni Muntadas.

Warhol’s 1978 portrait of the Brazilian football star Pelé, part of the artist’s Athletes series, considers the God-like status that many athletes assume. Brazilian artist and photographer Vik Muniz similarly depicts the sporting hero in his 2003 piece Edson (Pelé) from Pictures of Magazines, grinning next to Warhol’s. The depiction of athletes as adored and influential figures of pop culture is compounded by American painter Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of renowned Cameroonian player Samuel Eto’o, who won the African Player of the Year award a record of four times. Eto’o stands in his portrait (above) powerful, radiating, larger than life.

Other artists question to what extent football can be considered a ‘game’. Taryn Simon’s large-scale photograph from her series Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) focuses on the floral centrepiece that adorned the FIFA negotiating table when the sporting organisation agreed to outlaw third-party ownership of economic rights of football players. Paul Pfeiffer, on the other hand, injects amusing absurdity into the exhibition with his video Caryatid (2003), which features isolated footage of players ‘diving’ in attempts to gain penalties. The sport is stripped of solemnity; a quality more noticeable when gone.

The exhibition’s variety competes with the diverse definitions of football itself. It investigates how art can intersect with sport, two categories that can sometimes feel diametrically opposed. PAMM director Franklin Sirmans notes the exhibition ‘presents the art of the game as much as the game of art’.

INFORMATION

‘The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art’ is on view until 2 September. For more information, visit the PAMM website

ADDRESS

Pérez Art Museum Miami
1103 Biscayne Blvd
Miami

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Studio 54 started and ended with a bang. The legendary nightclub fired onto New York’s burgeoning club scene in 1974, raged for seven years, before plunging into scandal with the rising dawn of the 1980s.

Its unlikely founders, then-junior lawyer Ian Schrager and his client Steve Rubell, who owned a small chain of steak restaurants, have become just as talked about as Studio 54 itself. Though Rubell passed away in 1985, Schrager has gone on to have unprecedented success.

The Steve Jobs of the hotelier world, Schrager founded the ‘boutique hotel’ category of luxury accomodation in the 90s, and has spearheaded the concept ever since. Most recently, Schrager opened the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Public hotel in New York.

The behind the scenes goings-on of Studio 54, renowned for its writhing dance floor, fabulous guests and legal contretemps, has long been a source of intrigue. Nearly 40 years since its closing, Schrager has finally decided to immortalise its outrageous reign in book form.

‘Only one person can tell this story,’ he writes in the opening of Studio 54, a midnight-black and extravagantly embossed book published by Rizzoli, preparing us for the intimate, highly personal account that follows. Chapter to chapter, readers move to the very front of the golden-roped queue on West 54th Street, getting a rare glimpse behind those notoriously inaccessible black doors.

What follows is a riot of early sketches, plans and pages from Schrager’s scrapbook, anecdotes from its storied wassailers (from Andy Warhol to Debbie Harrie), and never before seen, access-all-areas, letters between Schrager, his lawyers, and the NYPD. Readers are given the VIP treatment (sans ‘alternating shots of Stoli with a hit of coke’ in the basement), served sketches of Paul Marantz’s famous lighting design, (along with a letter from the designer, who goes ‘on the record’ to ‘strongly urge’ Schrager to prohibit the use of the lighting rigs as climbing frames).

Comprehensive history this is not. But how could it be? Few who were there are likely to remember every chronological detail of their Studio 54 exprience. Misty memories are presented as such, with nebulous quotes and jumbles of fragmented photography tumbling from the pages.

Warhol wrote in his 1979 book, Andy Warhol’s Exposures: ‘Studio 54 is a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy on the dance floor.’ This book is that dance floor. Readers who weren’t lucky enough to be there, are made to feel as if they were. As Schrager writes, ‘This is for my family, children, and grandchildren to come... so they will know.’

INFORMATION

Studio 54, published by Rizzoli, £55

When Andy Warhol debuted his Brillo boxes in 1964, arguably the most recognisable examples of supermarket shipping carton replicas that he made, he probably would not have expected them to be as prized as they are today. The most recent value of one such specimen, following an international bidding war in 2010, reached an epic $3,050,5000 – a far cry from the $1,000 that Martin and Rita Skyler paid when they bought the very same piece back in 1969.

The Skylers and that box are the subjects of a new documentary that debuts on HBO on 7 August, coinciding with what would have been Warhol’s 89th birthday. Directed by Martin and Rita’s daughter Lisanne Skyler and featuring interviews with some of the contemporary art world’s most prominent figures, Brillo Box (3¢ Off) blends a relatable family narrative with facets of pop art history as it traces the journey of the sculpture, which the Skylers’ persuaded Warhol to sign – something that he did not practice at the time. The film culminates with footage of the record-breaking auction at Christie’s, ultimately presenting commentary on the ephemeral nature of art and how its value is determined today.

Trailer courtesy of HBO Documentary Films. Brillo Box (3¢ Off) airs 7 August, exclusively on HBO

Blurring the lines between art and commerce, Andy Warhol painted a portrait of America by celebrating iconic fixtures of American life. This film by Cadillac offers a rare glimpse into Warhol’s world..

It’s safe to say that Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes won’t expire any time soon. The latest evidence of the late artist’s omnipotence is a traveling exhibition titled 'Letters to Andy Warhol', centred on letters pulled from the artist’s extensive archive.

For the project, Cadillac and The Andy Warhol Museum commissioned an international group of creatives to produce new work inspired by Warhol. Reflecting the polymath artist’s prowess, the exhibition spans several mediums, from a star-packed short film by Chiara Clemente to a song composed by Warhol family friend Sean Lennon.

One of the standout works, is a large than life-sized children’s book inspired by a rejection letter Warhol received from MoMA. Referencing the artist’s early career as a fashion illustrator, the work was created by shoe designer Brian Atwood and Wallpaper* Italy editor-at-large JJ Martin. 'The whole idea was around creative redemption,' Martin explained. 'Even the most successful of us have all had terrible moments of rejection, of feeling stupid, unworthy and undesired.'

Turns out MoMA needed Warhol after all and the artist’s resilience – and ability to spin gold from the mundane – remains more prescient than ever. 'Warhol was the ultimate rebel and envelope pusher,' says Martin. 'I think he resounds so well with creative types because he was such a champion of creators and artists. He understood their needs. Warhol is still so modern today.  Can you imagine what he would have done on social media?'

Following its New York showing at Cadillac House, the exhibition will travel to Los Angeles in mid-January for display at the 101/Exhibit Gallery and then to Miami in early February before embarking on a global tour through early 2018.

INFORMATION
’Letters to Andy Warhol’ is on view at Cadillac House until 26 December. For more information, visit the Cadillac website and the Andy Warhol Museum website

ADDRESS

Cadillac House
330 Hudson St
New York, NY 10013

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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’.

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

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The New York gallery Luxembourg & Dayan is curently hosting ‘In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence’ – a show tracing the link between artists and their (eventually famous) assistants.

Be it Raphael, Rembrandt or Rubens, the notion of artists commanding workshops with a fleet of assistants to produce a plethora of paintings is an age-old tradition. Yet there’s been little exploration of the degree to which contemporary artists have influenced their assistants in terms of style, imagery and technique. To remedy that omission, Luxembourg & Dayan on New York’s Upper East Side is showcasing ‘In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence’.

Boasting a formidable lineup that includes Robert Gober, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, the show pairs the artists’ seminal creative endeavours with that of their assistants. In total, 20 creatives are represented.

‘We wanted to throw into relief how a number of assistants, who work under the shadow of a revered artist, borrow images and more while eventually becoming a master in their own right,’ says Tamar Margalit, who curated this show with Amalia Dayan.

While Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory first springs to mind when it comes to assistants churning out reams of art, few are aware that George Condo was among the many who laboured in that downtown studio. On view is Warhol's pop art touchstone, Howdy Doody, 1981, in a magnetic red, which Condo personally silkscreened. Nearby is Condo's Television Silkscreen (Howdy Doody/Mr. Howell), only his rendition, completed 17 years later, is in a subtler palette. ‘They reveal a visual dialogue and how that image circulated in Condo’s mind,’ Margalit says.

Similarly, Urs Fischer’s surreal Body Parts Untitled, 2006, featuring everything from an ear to a nose rendered in polyurethane and plaster, hover overhead in the gallery. That work is ‘in conversation’ with his assistant Darren Bader’s video of portions of the human body floating in space.

‘These are just a window on to artistic conversations – and with Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney and others taking on assistants at a steady clip, this is just the tip of the iceberg,’ says Margalit.

The formidable lineup includes Robert Gober, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, among the 20 artists represented.

‘We wanted to throw into relief how a number of assistants, who work under the shadow of a revered artist, borrow images and more while eventually becoming a master in their own right,’ says Tamar Margalit who curated this show with Amalia Dayan.

'This is just the tip of the iceberg,’ says Margalit.

INFORMATION

‘In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence’ is on view until 16 April. For more details, visit Luxembourg & Dayan’s website

Photography: Adam Reich. Courtesy Luxembourg & Dayan

ADDRESS

Luxembourg & Dayan
64 East 77th Street
New York, NY 10075

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Television and art are not often regarded as being remotely in the same league, but the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida is proving the influence that avant-garde art had on television in its nascent years. Organised together with the Jewish Museum in New York and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, ‘Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television’ pulls together two cherished pillars of American culture.

Spanning the late 1940s to the mid 1970s, the exhibition presents how American television took on a modernist aesthetic as its inspiration. Over 250 fine art objects and examples of graphic design, including works from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Saul Bass, Roy Lichtenstein and Georgia O’ Keeffe, stand alongside television memorabilia, clips and ephemera from iconic television series and shows, such as The Ernie Kovacs Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and even The Twilight Zone. From the Pop Art aesthetics reflected in early Batman epsiodes to Op Art-esque commercials for Kodak and sets for The Ed Sullivan Show, the connections are rather unexpected, to say the least.

In addition to a showing of early advertising, which still exude an exciting quality and were revolutionary at the time, the exhibition also highlights the ‘New Advertising’ revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, where Andy Warhol and Ben Shahn created advertising and commercial campaigns for CBS.

And finally, to prove just how entwined television and art were in popular culture, the exhibition also documents how artists like Salvador Dali, Willem de Kooning, Ray Eames and Marcel Duchamp became household names, thanks to television appearances that were broadcast nationwide. A series of rare TV clips forms part of the experience.

INFORMATION

‘Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television’ runs until 10 January 2016

ADDRESS

NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
1 East Las Olas Boulevard
Fort Lauderdale, Florida

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New York’s 1980’s art world, then chock a block with Warhol’s infamous Factory, along with regular sightings of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cindy Sherman on the prowl, is now somewhat clouded by today’s hipster galleries that dominate Chelsea. Yet that particular chapter in history can be relived in all its glory via the photographer Jeanette Montgomery Barron’s scrapbook-like tome, My Years in the 1980s New York Art Scene, which is packed with her snaps, shot in the studios of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and other now notable artists, as well as gallery posters and Village Voice reviews.

'I was fortunate to be in the center of it all,' says Barron who now resides in Kent, Connecticut, where her husband heads up James Barron Art.  At the tender age of 24, Barron was introduced by the prominent Zurich dealer Bruno Bischofberger to a wide range of artists in the Big Apple. From there, armed with her Hassleblad much like Robert Mapplethorpe, she captured the lower Manhattan art scene. In between hitting gallery openings and countless dinner parties, Barron also modeled for both painter Alex Katz and fashion photographer David Seidner. Both of their works are included in her latest book.

Despite the intimate photo-documentation of Andy Warhol’s tête à têtes with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and captures of David Salle and others in their studios, Barron is far from just a social photographer. Not only have more than 30 of her images been acquired by the Max Mara private museum Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, her work is also included in the permanent collections of Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Andy Warhol Museum.

INFORMATION

’My Years in the 1980s New York Art Scene’ is published by Collezione Maramotti and Silvana Editoriale. Available at Amazon and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

ADDRESS

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
17 West 54th Street
New York, NY 

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Andy Warhol, notoriously obsessed by money, once famously said, 'Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art.' In a show that epitomises this brash statement, London auction house Sotheby’s has, in 'The Art of Making Money', gathered a never-seen-before museum-quality collection of 21 artworks that celebrate the power and symbolism of the US dollar.

Unveiled to the public for the first time and estimated at a value of around £50 million, the haul includes the most important collection of Warhol 'dollar' paintings in private hands – the artist's seminal One Dollar Bill (Silver Certificate) is among them, with an estimated value of £13–18 million alone.

Other highlights include Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s $, 2001, a glitzy dollar sign studded with shimmering white lights; and in Keith Haring's Untitled from 1982, the dollar symbol – turned into an icon of pop art by Warhol – is layered with new meaning and complexities by his socialist protégé, who, unlike Warhol, felt uneasy about the relationship between art and business.

Due to go under the hammer on 1 and 2 July 2015, the collection also includes pieces by Joseph Beuys, Arman, Scott Campbell, Francesco Clemente, Robert Silvers, Cildo Meireles, Ronnie Cutrone, Jin Wang, Liu Zheng and Gustave Buchet, who, just like Warhol, have all been seduced and inspired by the dollar and its mesmerising power.

ADDRESS

Sotheby’s
34-35 New Bond Street
London W1A 2AA

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Picture old William Morris, grave and bearded, wearing the floppy white wig of Andy Warhol, or a pair of his trademark Miltzen sunglasses. It's an image of the sort that could have come out of Warhol's Factory, the mythical Manhattan space in which he collaborated with his coterie of artists and celebrity muses and where he crafted his legendary silkscreens.

The image doesn't exist, of course, but it symbolises the juxtaposition Jeremy Deller, another artistic prankster, wishes to highlight in 'Love is Enough', the newly opened exhibition he's curated at Modern Art Oxford.

In plucking rarely-seen works by Morris and Warhol, Deller has drawn comparisons between the two luminaries, despite the nearly 100-year gap between their careers. Both led significant artistic movements during which they collaborated with close-knit groups of artists, living communally for long stretches (both rejected the capitalistic styles of their day). And both were wildly successful in their time, widely imitated by some yet misunderstood by others.

Deller, a collaborator extraordinaire and Turner Prize-winner who began his career with a summer 'internship' at the Factory, has set them up in parallel over the dedicated space in Oxford. There are Morris' engravings, wallpapers and booklets, products of the artist's innovations in printing and distribution in the early years of mass production - and initiatives to get art into the hands of the middle classes.

On the other side is a photograph of Warhol holding a giant acetate from his famous Marilyn series of silkscreens, along with a 1985 Joan Collins, at the height of her Dynasty fame - critiques of the 20th-century culture of mass manufacturing. Warhol's 1970 'Flowers' screen print, albeit tenuously linked to Morris's floral-repeat textiles, is nonetheless evidence of the artist's commitment to the long tradition of floral painting.

In one room, segments of Morris tapestry featuring the Arthurian knights Sirs Galahad, Bors and Percival spying the Holy Grail demonstrates his attention to traditional craft and detail. It looks across to a rare 1968 Warhol tapestry of Marilyn Monroe, meticulously hand-produced by artists at the Charles E Slatkin Galleries, and displayed here for the first time in a public museum. The suggestion is that Warhol's (still strong) brand is a natural continuation of the brand Morris established in the late 19th century.

Deller famously said, 'I don't make things, I make things happen.' Yet to celebrate the launch of 'Love is Enough', he did right by his fans. For our December issue (see W*189) he designed our limited edition cover - available to subscribers - with Fraser Muggeridge studio, combining Frederick Holler's 1884 photograph of William Morris with a Warhol-inspired camouflage (its strapline, 'Get mumbo-jumbo out of the world', is based on Morris' dying words). He's also produced a limited edition artwork, hand printed on four different neon papers at Morris' famous Kelmscott Press. Until 31 December 2014, Wallpaper* is offering 50 copies to readers, at a discount price of £75. To secure a print, contact Modern Art Oxford.

ADDRESS

Modern Art Oxford
30 Pembroke St
Oxford OX1 1BP

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An artist from China or Russia in the years following Glasnost and economic reform wouldn't have had much in common with his counterpart in the UK or US. Certainly the ideological links between those nations would have been tenuous at best. What they did share was a keen awareness of the imagery that besieged them - from bookshops, billboards and buildings of church and state - and the pop artists who exploited it.

In the East, people whose lives were strongly dictated were suddenly expected to think for themselves. Meanwhile in the West, people long expected to think for themselves were being told what to do and think. The disillusionment felt by artists coming of age at that time spawned a legacy of highly charged late-pop art.

That work is the subject of a far-reaching exhibition opened this week at London's Saatchi Gallery. Assembled by curators representing Russia, China and Taiwan, as well as the UK and US, 'Post Pop: East Meets West' features 250 works from three decades following the heyday of pop art.

It opens with a false sense of serenity in the monochrome 'Habitat' section, dominated by Ai Weiwei's 'Sofa in White', a replica of the standard-issue Chinese tufted armchair cast in marble, denying the comfort it's meant to offer. Bill Woodrow's 'Hoover Breakdown' references the mood of the modern housewife with a scattering of vacuum parts headed for the fan of a larger model. Richard Woods' recent 'Nature Making' portrays the act of destroying trees in the name of 'natural' furniture. Mounted on a whitewashed brick wall is Rachel Whiteread's 'Untitled (Black Books)', painted over in matt black so that nothing can be learned from it - least of all about the owner.

Soon enough, however, the bleeps of a Mao Zedong-themed video game crescendo and the branding appears: Jeff Koons' Spalding basketballs; Tom Sachs' 'Nutsy's McDonald's', assembled with visible nuts and bolts, including instructions on how to cook a 'prefab' meal. Alexander Kosolapov, luminary of Russia's sots art, or Soviet pop art, movement, presents a trinity of faceless Madonnas upstaged by a grid of caviar labels.

You'd think a generation of artists raised in the relative absence of religion would have escaped the pull of iconography. But therein lies the conflict in 'Ideology & Religion', perhaps the show's strongest section. If you're not scared straight by 'Die Harder', a screaming steel crucifix spiked with coat hangers by Turner Prize-nominee David Mach, you will be by the 12 shrouded figures worshipping at the altar of carved-wood toast slices by Anatoly Osmolovsky.

Further up the building the art goes increasingly meta, reproducing genres as disparate as classical Greek sculpture, English romantic, even pop art. After the umpteenth Warhol nod, the homage begins to wear thin - as does the line between the gallery proper and the second-floor gift shop. Perhaps this is the desired effect. At this time of year, does it matter?

ADDRESS

Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York's HQ
King's Road
London SW3 4RY

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