Exhibition Of Andy Warhol's Cars At The Montclair Art Museum

Written by Tansy Millhouse Tuesday, 17 May 2011 00:32

Montclair, NJ - As one of the most iconic and influential artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol has helped to define America. His signature images of such American products and celebrities as Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor have become instantly recognizable, while challenging traditional and cherished distinctions: between fine and commercial art, the mechanical and hand made, popular taste and high culture, repetition and singularity. In doing so, Warhol himself has attained a level of celebrity and public visibility unknown to most artists. Yet despite the intense attention paid to Warhol since the time of his death, in 1987, his preoccupation with another American icon, the automobile, has been largely overlooked.

The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) now breaks new ground in presenting Warhol and Cars: American Icons, the first exhibition to examine Warhol’s enduring fascination with automotive vehicles as products of American consumer society. Highlighting MAM’s pivotal, little known, early silkscreen painting, "Twelve Cadillacs", 1962, Warhol and Cars features more than 40 drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, and related archival documents on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum and private collections spanning Warhol’s career from 1946 to 1986. The exhibition will be shown exclusively at the Montclair Art Museum, on view until June 19.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and thematically, tracing the development of Warhol’s work with cars throughout his career. Exhibition highlights include a rare, spontaneous drawing of the 1940s featuring a produce truck operated by Warhol’s brother Paul, works on paper of the 1950s, dating from the era of Warhol’s commercial magazine illustration; and paintings and prints from his important and poignant "Car Crash" series. A key work is "Twelve Cadillacs", part of a group of nine Warhol car paintings published in the November 1962 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, which commissioned Warhol to make a visual commentary on the phenomenon of the iconic American motor car. The repetition and grid organization became a central feature of Warhol’s work. For the first time, "Twelve Cadillacs" will be juxtaposed with potential source images, as well as the related "Seven Cadillacs" and the handpainted "Lincoln Continental", both of which were also part of the Harper’s Bazaar commission.


Also on view will be a related drawing and car model of Cadillacs from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection of American Automobile Art. Warhol’s continued engagement with the theme of the automobile is seen in prints and paintings of the 1970s and 1980s based on Volkswagen advertisements, as well as in multiple photographs of European and American cars sewn together with thread into a format evocative of Warhol’s characteristic assembly-line aesthetic. Also featured will be a film of the artist painting a BMW in 1979 as part of the BMW Art Race Car Projects introduced by French race car driver Hervé Poulain. A painted miniature model of this car will be among a number of rare archival documents. It will be complemented by a unique, recently discovered, large-scale fiberglass maquette of a 1978 BMW art race car incorporating Warhol’s Pop art floral design, exhibited in the United States for the first time.

The Montclair Art Museum was one of the country’s first museums primarily engaged in collecting American art (including the work of contemporary, nonacademic artists) and among the first dedicated to the study and creation of a significant ethnographic art collection. This pioneering spirit still reverberates in the Museum’s pursuit and presentation of high-quality art that characterizes and celebrates America’s diversity. The collection has grown to over 12,000 works. The American collection, which began with a gift of 30 paintings from William T. Evans, a Montclair civic leader, comprises paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculpture dating from the 18th century to the present, and features excellent works by Benjamin West, Asher B. Durand, George Inness, John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as younger and emerging artists such as Louise Lawler, Chakaia Booker, Whitfield Lovell, and Willie Cole. The Museum’s superb holdings of traditional and contemporary American Indian art and artifacts represent the cultural achievements in weaving, pottery, wood carving, jewelry, and textiles of indigenous Americans from seven major regions—Northwest Coast, California, Southwest, Plains, Woodlands, Southeast, and the Arctic. The collection was begun by Annie Valentine Rand and carried on by her philanthropic daughter Florence Rand Lang, one of the Museum’s founders, and continues to grow with commissioned works, gifts, and purchases that celebrate the vitality and modernity of traditional forms and beliefs. Among the contemporary American Indian artists represented are Tony Abeyta, Dan Namingha, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Allan Houser, Bentley Spang, and Marie Watt. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.montclairartmuseum.org

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