Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Price of Fame

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In the 1960s, Andy Warhol began to crack the glossy veneer of celebrity culture in portraits of figures like Jackie Kennedy, whose glamour was intertwined with pathos and fragility. Warhol evoked mass media’s transformation of the individual into a consumable icon, a path followed more recently by Anne Collier, Elizabeth Peyton, and Richard Prince. Many of the works in this gallery examine the fantasy of stardom and expose its darker side—the flashbulb’s glare, the menacing intrusions of paparazzi, and the voracious appetites of audiences raised on a diet of pop culture and political disillusionment. Others explore how the glut of media imagery leads ordinary people to internalize the rituals of glamour and fandom by appropriating everything from costumes and makeup to the artificial poses of film stills and headshots. These works may be seen as confirming the insidious influence of the mass-media machine or may point to the liberating possibilities of casting oneself as a star.

Below is a selection of works from Price of Fame.

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Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963

Colorful artwork of woman faces by Andy Warhol.
Colorful artwork of woman faces by Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963. Silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, thirty-six panels: 80 × 144 in. (203.2 × 365.8 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; jointly owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art; gift of Ethel Redner Scull 86.61a‒jj. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For this work, one of his first commissioned portraits, Andy Warhol escorted art collector Ethel Scull to a Photomat in a Times Square pinball arcade. Under the artist’s guidance, she posed with and without her large sunglasses, appearing alternately glamorous and playful, serious and vacuous. This grid reproduces only some of the more than one hundred resulting photographs. Scull and her husband, Robert, who engaged Warhol to make the painting as a birthday gift to his wife, had elicited art world recognition with their ambitious patronage of early Pop art. With its insistent, cinematic multiplicity of expressions and poses, Warhol’s portrait elevates Ethel to the iconic realm previously reserved for his depictions of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe.

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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