Andy Warhol The Joseph Beuys Portraits

14 December 2023—9 February 2024

Ely House, London

Scroll down to learn more

Revisiting the earliest meetings of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys in 1979, this exhibition brings together a group of Warhol’s celebrated portraits of Beuys. While the Beuys portraits are held in the collections of major institutions internationally – including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Tate, London – this is the first time the works have been presented with a solo focus since they were exhibited in the 1980s.

The Beuys portraits demonstrate Warhol’s characteristically experimental approach to materials and technique, which position him as one of the foremost portraitists of the 20th century. He pursued variation in his approach to colour, composition and medium, rather than with the image itself, resulting in great diversity within the body of work, including some of the artist’s earliest uses of diamond dust in portraits.

Watch a video of the exhibition

Play

Pause

For those who witnessed them approaching each other across the polished granite floor, the moment had all the ceremonial aura of two rival popes meeting in Avignon.

— David Galloway, 1988

Warhol and Beuys first met each other in person at an exhibition opening in Düsseldorf, Germany, marking a key point of contact between the leading representatives of American and European art.

The two giants of art history met on several further occasions that year, including on 30 October 1979 during the installation of Beuys’s landmark retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The German artist visited Warhol’s studio to have his portrait taken, arriving at the same time that Georgia O’Keeffe was being photographed.

Image: Mimmo Jodice’s photo of Warhol and Beuys, 1980. Photograph: Antonia Reeve/Joesph Beuys/National Galleries of Scotland/Tate

Fascinated by repetition, Warhol created multiple versions of an image in a variety of mediums and on a range of different supports. In this monumental canvas from 1983, he pursues repetition within the work itself as he depicts Beuys’s head and shoulders 64 times in a gridded format. With their tonal values inverted, the portraits give the effect of a photographic negative, as if each iteration of the artist is a separate frame on a strip of negative, relating the painting to the artist’s Reversals – a series that reverses the tonal values of key images drawn from across his career, including Warhol’s iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa and Mao.

Joseph Beuys (Reversal), 1983
Acrylic, silkscreen ink and diamond dust on canvas
213.4 x 177.8 cm (84 x 70 in)

Enquire

Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

— Andy Warhol

Joseph Beuys, 1980
Synthetic polymer paint, diamond dust and silkscreen ink on linen
30.5 x 85.4 cm (12 x 33.62 in)

Enquire

Warhol first started experimenting with diamond dust in 1979, applying a thin layer of the substance to his works when they were still wet to create alluring, shimmering surfaces. In 1980, mere months before the earliest Beuys portraits were created, the Diamond Dust Shoes became the first series to feature this new material innovation, completing Warhol’s depictions of women’s high-heeled shoes with a luxurious finish. In contrast, the use of diamond dust in the Beuys portraits becomes almost metaphysical and alludes to the German artist’s mystical persona as a shamanic figure who believed in art’s power to transform society.

Joseph Beuys, 1980
Silkscreen ink and diamond dust on canvas
101.6 x 101.6 cm (40 x 40 in)

Enquire

Warhol used his Polaroid Big Shot to capture the now-iconic image of Beuys dressed in his signature felt hat and fishing vest, which went on to serve as the source image for this series of screenprinted portraits made between 1980 and 1986.

Joseph Beuys, 1980
Synthetic polymer paint, diamond dust, silkscreen ink on linen
101.6 x 101.6 cm (40 x 40 in)

Enquire

In this 40-by-40-inch painting – a standard size of many of the painted portraits – the artist juxtaposes mechanical silkscreen printing methods with hand-painted elements. Loading the brush, he dragged it across the canvas in expressionistic sweeps to leave traces of his hand within the very materiality of the paint itself. This textural application allows dynamic variation to play out across the surface of the work, whilst remaining within the scope of the artist’s monochromatic black-on-black palette.

Joseph Beuys, 1980
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas
102 x 102 cm (40.16 x 40.16 in)

Enquire

Despite fundamental differences in their philosophical approaches to artmaking, Warhol and Beuys shared an alchemical ability to render everyday objects and images unfamiliar through their practices, as well as a compulsion towards self-stylisation as they carefully cultivated their respective public images: Beuys was the shamanic artist whose mythical origins lay in his rescue from a plane crash by nomadic Tatars, while Warhol cultivated his public image as the ‘Pope of Pop’, instantly recognisable in his silver-blonde wig.

‘He himself is a sort of ghost, he has spirituality,’ said Beuys of Warhol. ‘Maybe this tabula rasa that Andy Warhol does [in his pictures], this emptiness and cleansing of any traditional signature […] is something that creates the possibility of allowing radically different perspectives to enter.’

Joseph Beuys (Beige background), 1983–3
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas
50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in)

Enquire

[The portraits] are a rich record, an amazing parade of faces, an insight for future generations into the European and American culture of [Warhol’s] time. — Vincent Fremont, Executive Studio Manager & A Founding Director of the Warhol Foundation

Joseph Beuys, 1980
Silkscreen with diamond dust on brown paper; framed under glass
121.9 x 91.4 cm (48 x 36 in)

Enquire

While in the 1960s Warhol’s first significant group of portraits critiqued the commodification of celebrity images as he created glamorous renditions of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor, in the 1970s and 1980s, his scope expanded through his commissioned portraits to reflect his fascination with the cultural and political icons of the 20th century. This resulted in a number of artist portraits, including those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe and, of course, Joseph Beuys.

Joseph Beuys, 1980
Silkscreen ink on paper
100 x 79 cm (39.37 x 31.1 in)

Enquire

Unique Trial Proofs were conceived by Warhol as an experimental subgroup of works within a larger series that allowed him to test out potential colour and compositional variations. Jörg Schellmann, the publisher who worked closely with Warhol in the 1980s, explains, ‘these Trial Proofs can be seen as essentially the same as Warhol’s originals.’ Yet, demonstrating the artist’s innovative conceptualisation of artmaking, they can be understood to radically dismantle traditional distinctions made between processes of creation and the final image, as well as the notion of editioned and original works.

Joseph Beuys, 1980–3
Unique Trial Proof screenprint with rayon flock on Lenox Museum Board
101.6 x 81.3 cm (40 x 32 in)

Enquire

Warhol transformed his photographic source material through a process of simplification. He removed extraneous details to produce emblematic, icon-like representations of his sitters, which were then screenprinted onto different supports. ‘With silkscreening,’ he explained, ‘you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue on silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time.’

Joseph Beuys, 1980–3
Unique Trial Proof screenprint on Lenox Museum Board
50.8 x 81.3 cm (20 x 32 in)

Enquire

Created at the same time as the screenprinted portraits of Beuys, this drawing demonstrates Warhol’s ability to deftly translate images across mediums. Drawing was a sustaining activity for the artist across the four decades of his intensely productive career: from his early work as a commercial illustrator and the erotic drawings of the 1950s to his late, hand-drawn portraits. With its confident, graphic simplicity, this graphite depiction of Beuys demonstrates the skilled draughtsmanship that underpinned Warhol’s use of printing technologies, offering a unique insight into the range of his mark-making when working with an image.

Joseph Beuys, c.1980
Graphite on paper
80 x 58.4 cm (31.5 x 23 in)

Enquire

Enquire about available works