“Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again”
opened this week at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art and runs through Sept. 2.
It includes more than 300 works spanning
Warhol’s 40-year career.
The show features some of the artist’s most
iconic creations — depictions of Campbell’s
soup cans and Brillo boxes, for instance, and
silkscreen portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn
Monroe, Elvis Presley and others — along with
lesser-known pieces from his early and later
years. It next travels to the Art Institute
of Chicago.
“Warhol is constantly labeled a pop artist, but
all that happened within three or four years,
and then he moved on and the work goes quite
dark and explores questions of gender and
sexual identity, fame, subcultures,” said Gary
Garrels, Elise S. Haas senior curator of painting
and sculpture for the San Francisco museum.
The show’s title comes from Warhol’s 1975
memoir in which he touches on key themes
from his work, such as celebrity, money and
love. The artist died in 1987 at age 58.
De Salvo said the San Francisco museum’s team
“really enlightened me in terms of thinking
about Warhol through the lens of social media.”
It’s a common thread throughout the show.
“When you see some of the rooms, particularly
the portraits, we really conceptualized it in a
way of thinking about Facebook,” she said.
Warhol’s understanding of the power of images
to create identity and aura can be traced to
his early years, after he moved to New York in
1949 and got a job as a commercial illustrator.