Exhibition Review: Factory Work - Warhol, Wyeth, and Basquiat - Page 2

Furthermore, and perhaps the most interesting part of the exhibition, Warhol and Wyeth painted each other's portraits, as Basquiat and Warhol later did. It is in these portraits that we discover a close, even intimate (in a friendship way) relationship between these artists.

When I was visiting the museum, I was lucky to run into the fair Victoria Wyeth, granddaughter of Andrew and niece to Jamie. As she walked through the museum and talked about her talented family, she revealed some intimate insights into her uncle's relationship and influence from and to Andy Warhol.

Thirty years ago, a journalist referred to the 1976 exhibition of the Wyeth and Warhol portraits at the Coe Kerr Gallery in New York City as "The Patriarch of Pop Paints the Prince of Realism." Famed art critic Hilton Kramer referred to these same portraits as "an all male version of Beauty and the Beast."

It is one of these portraits of Warhol by Wyeth ("Portrait of Andy Warhol," 1976, and presumably Kramer’s "beast") that really stands out as a unique insight into an artist whose face is perhaps second only to Frida Kahlo’s in the recognition factor among the art world’s portraiture consciousness.

Wyeth has said about this portrait that Warhol’s "whole thing of absorbing everything, of recording — turning yourself into a sort of tape recorder — that appealed to me. I had that element in my vocabulary at that point anyway, but he re-instated it in me. Our work was diametrically opposite. But I loved the idea that he was a recorder. And I styled myself after it - or at least, it appealed to me; it fit right into what I wanted to do. And then I selfishly wanted to record him and paint every pimple that he had on his face. And he let me."

While I was at the museum, it was this portrait of Warhol that attracted the most attention, even from a visiting self-proclaimed Warholite who told me that she had come to the exhibition just to see it  it (the painting is owned by the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville).

Article Author: Lenny Campello

F. Lennox Campello is a widely published Washington, DC and Philadelphia based art critic, as well as an award winning artist and curator. He is also often heard on NPR and the Voice of America discussing visual art issues. …

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