When Warhol met Beuys A new exhibition set up at the London headquarters of Thaddaeus Ropac tells the story of the bond that united the two masters through a series of "pop" portraits
BY GILDA BRUNO
On the one hand, Andy Warhol and his Pop art so revolutionary as to forever undermine the rules of the art of the time by reinterpreting objects of common usage, prominent figures and aspects of popular culture outside their context of reference with bright colors and a healthy dose of irony. On the other hand, Joseph Beuys, a multidisciplinary, speculative and magnetic artist, capable of ranging from his 'social sculpture' and performance to teaching and redefinition of the very concept of art. What united them was a chance, almost predestined meeting: it was 1979 when the two met for the first time at the Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition.
Between Warhol and Beuys, emblems of American and European creativity, respectively, there was 'the ceremonial aura of two rival popes meeting in Avignon', wrote David Galloway, American author, curator, journalist and academic, in the magazine «Art in America» in July 1988. Despite appearances, their first contact was nothing more than the beginning of a long series of exchanges which, over the years, gave birth to a friendship based on creative dialogue and the desire to push beyond the limits of conventional imagination.
On the 30th October of the same year, Beuys was already invited to go to Warhol's famous Factory, then located a few steps from Union Square Park, to allow the Pittsburgh-born painter, artist and director to paint him to celebrate his retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. Armed with his "Big Shot" Polaroid, Warhol took one of his most iconic photographs ever, immortalizing Beuys with his felt hat and waistcoat in an image that perfectly captures his energetic and curious personality. Precisely starting from that portrait, between 1980 and 1986, Warhol himself developed a collection of silk-screened prints, now at the center of a new exhibition at the London headquarters of Thaddaeus Ropac.
Open to the public until the 9 February 2024, Andy Warhol: The Joseph Beuys Portraits exhibition represents a more than unique opportunity to closely observe this body of work in a showcase inspired by their creator. Despite being housed within the permanent collections of some of the most important institutions in the world, from the MoMA in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Tate in London, and having previously been exhibited at the Galleria Lucio Amelio in Naples, the Galerie Klüser in Munich and the Center for Contemporary Art in Geneva, from 1980 to today, this series of portraits has never been the focus of a retrospective dedicated to Warhol's counter-current talent.
A tribute to his ability to exponentially multiply the fruits of his innovative eye, thanks to which he started large-scale reproduction in the artistic field, these portraits take us into the heart of his process: 'With silk-screen printing', Warhol said, 'you take a photograph, enlarge it, transfer it with glue onto silk and then roll some ink on it in such a way that it passes through the silk but not the glue. By doing this the same image will be slightly different each time'. According to Beuys, Warhol was 'a sort of ghost, endowed with spirituality'. Thus, leveraging his ability to see beyond the physical features of his subjects, Warhol conquered the world with portraits that lend faith to the countless variations of the human being.
'Perhaps this tabula rasa that Andy Warhol aspires to in his portraits, Beuys hypothesized, this emptiness and cleanliness of every traditional signature is precisely what allows the entry of radically different perspectives'. It is enough to look at the evergreen essence of Warhol's cultural legacy to realize how long the German artist saw it.
