Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Price of Fame

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Colorful artwork of woman faces by Andy Warhol.

Colorful artwork of woman faces by Andy Warhol.

Price of Fame

Floor 6

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.

Please note: This work is no longer on view.

This photograph pictures part of the Chicago headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company, an African American–owned business that publishes Ebony and Jet magazines, among other titles. Constructed in 1971, the offices were intended to express a black, modernist aesthetic reinforcing the ideology of the corporation and its periodicals. David Hartt describes his concern with the “built environment as a vehicle for the layering of history,” here staging an encounter between the past—a backdrop of 1970s-era fabric wallpaper—and the contemporary, signified by a promotional poster for Jet featuring the singer Janelle Monae. The emptiness and austerity of the image is telling: shortly after Hartt documented the Johnson headquarters, the company sold the structure it had built and occupied for nearly four decades and moved to smaller offices.

Drawing of a woman undressing below letters C and K.

Drawing of a woman undressing below letters C and K.

Please note: This work is no longer on view.

Please note: This work is no longer on view.

These photographs of poet and singer-songwriter Patti Smith were shot in a Greenwich Village apartment by her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe. They capture a moment shortly before the two artists rose from relative obscurity and poverty to international acclaim—a period documented in Smith’s 2010 memoir, Just Kids. The image on the right served as the cover of Horses, her debut album. Recalling the shoot, Smith has said, “The only rule we had was, Robert told me if I wore a white shirt, not to wear a dirty one . . . I got my favorite ribbon and my favorite jacket, and he took about twelve pictures. By the eighth one, he said, 'I got it.'"

A drawing by Rachel Harrison. An abstract portrait of the late musician Amy Winehouse

A drawing by Rachel Harrison. An abstract portrait of the late musician Amy Winehouse

Please note: This work is no longer on view.

This drawing is one of a series that Rachel Harrison made of the late singer Amy Winehouse. Some of the drawings show Winehouse alone, while others pair her with images of famous artists or iconic works from art history. In this instance, the singer is paired with a loose mash-up of several of Pablo Picasso’s female subjects. Harrison leaves the meaning of any parallels between the two women up to the viewer to determine. The timing of the work, however, which was made the year after the pop star died from alcohol poisoning at the age of twenty-seven, suggests Winehouse as an ambiguous yet tragic muse for Harrison.

Please note: This work is no longer on view.

A photograph of a poster of a photograph of Madonna, this image is thrice removed from its source. The original image is also distanced from the work by time: fashion photographer Steven Meisel shot the music icon more than a decade before Anne Collier made this work, and the poster’s creases testify to age and handling. Yet if this timeworn quality hints at nostalgia, Collier’s clinical aesthetic betrays a critical edge. In rephotographing this pop-cultural artifact, she implicitly questions whether the power dynamic captured by the poster—a man’s voyeuristic gaze encountering a woman’s insouciant resistance—also endures.

A work by Martha Rosler. First Lady Pat Nixon is posed in an interior of the White House. A harrowing image of a figure in agony is collaged over the mantle behind her.

A work by Martha Rosler. First Lady Pat Nixon is posed in an interior of the White House. A harrowing image of a figure in agony is collaged over the mantle behind her.

This photograph is part of Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, which addressed the disconnect between American middle-class aspirations and the war in Vietnam. Most of the works in the series integrate graphic images of the conflict into tranquil domestic interiors. Here, however, Rosler features First Lady Pat Nixon in her 1969 Inaugural Ball dress in the White House’s Yellow Oval Room. Behind her, in lieu of a painting, hangs a still from the bloody conclusion of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which was inspired by the same violent media images from Vietnam. Nixon’s gracious smile stands in sharp contrast to actress Faye Dunaway’s anguished expression as she is pummeled by bullets.

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Andy Warhol, Nine Jackies, 1964

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Narrator: In this painting, Andy Warhol presents nine images of Jacqueline Kennedy in the moments leading up to and following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. In the top row, we see Jacqueline Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, just before the assassination. Notice the faint image of John F. Kennedy ‘s face at the edge of each frame. In the middle row, we see the First Lady during her husband’s funeral procession. And in the bottom row, Warhol presents a close-up of her grief-stricken face, taken from a photograph of Mrs. Kennedy standing next to Lyndon B. Johnson as he was sworn in aboard Air Force One. In this work, Warhol points out how the media turned Kennedy into a symbol of the grief of a nation.

Warhol took these images from newspaper photographs, which he cropped and then silkscreened onto canvas. By his deliberate repetition of the poignant images, Warhol poses an important question: When the media bombards us with repeated images of tragedy, does this make us relive and reenact these horrific events or does it gradually numb us to the pain?

Jacqueline Kennedy herself recognized the importance of the media and used it brilliantly. To hear how, tap your screen.

Colorful artwork of woman faces by Andy Warhol.

Colorful artwork of woman faces by Andy Warhol.

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.

Renée Green often draws on archival materials to trace little-known histories. In Partially Buried Triptych Green highlights the suppression and dissemination of revolutionary practices across cultures and over time by exposing connections between the American activist Angela Davis and the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who is perhaps best known for his provocative critiques of contemporary Western consumer culture. At left, a reproduction of an appropriated 1970 Life magazine cover features the then-fugitive Davis, while the middle panel juxtaposes photos of Davis and Adorno from the mid-1960s, when Davis studied in Frankfurt with the philosopher. In the panel on the right Green illustrates the annexing of once-countercultural symbols, in this case the Afro hairstyle, by contemporary culture.

Rosalyn Drexler is usually associated with Pop art, but her work often explores the dark backstories and seedier manifestations of postwar media culture and gender roles. She clipped her subjects from printed materials—here, a news photograph of Marilyn Monroe fleeing the paparazzi with her bodyguard in tow—then enlarged and collaged them onto canvas, and painted over the image. In the artist’s words, her source images were “hidden but present, like a disturbing memory.” On the day this source photograph was taken in 1956, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were to announce their upcoming marriage; in the frenzy to cover the event, a car carrying reporters crashed, killing at least one member of the press. Drexler’s painting is an eerie evocation of the sometimes tragicresults of our society’s insatiable desire for celebrity news.

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