By Mary Beth Almond BLOOMFIELD HILLS — After receiving a painting of Pelé in Andy Warhol’s “The Athlete Series” from the late Rose Shuey in 2001, Cranbrook Art Museum Director Gregory Wittkopp has been on a mission to reunite the Brazilian soccer star with the nine other paintings from the series. “Andy Warhol: Grand Slam,” which runs through Jan. 11 at the Cranbrook Art Museum, does that and much more, bringing together more than 200 of Warhol’s signature pieces in all areas of his practice from the 1960s until his death in 1987. “Being part of a university where artists are so much a part of the energy of the place, we always try to privilege explaining the process — both the conceptual process for generating the idea, and the physical process of making artwork. I’m really glad that we are able to do that and bring all of the pieces together,” Wittkopp said. At the center of the exhibition is “The Athlete Series” — a collection of 10 paintings, commissioned by art collector Robert Weisman, of the greatest sports figures of the late 1970s. At that time, the two most popular leisure time activities were sports and art, which Weisman said, quite frankly, don’t really have a connection. “Most people who are really into sports, are not really big into the art world, and most people in the art world really don’t like sports. … (The series) really opens up a new group of people that have never been in a museum (to the art world) and that was one of the reason why I did it,” he said. Because Warhol “absolutely did not know the difference between a golf ball and a football,” Weisman said he picked out the athletes for the portraits, which include Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Chris Evert, Rod Gilbert, Tom Seaver, O.J. Simpson, Dorothy Hamill, Pelé, Willie Shoemaker and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “In most of the other places that (Weisman) has shown his 10 athletes, all people see are the 10 athletes. This is an exception, in that we’re using his work and his generosity as the point of departure for a big Andy Warhol retrospective. We decided that we wanted to show a good cross-section of Warhol’s work in his four major medias — painting, photography, film and print,” Wittkopp said. “Andy Warhol: Grand Slam” was also an opportunity to celebrate the recent gift of more than 150 photographs — previously held by the Andy Warhol Foundation — to the museum. Wittkopp said the images, many of which were taken using a Polaroid, showcase Warhol’s use of photography as a compositional aid for the creation of prints and paintings. “These are the type of images that Andy Warhol would take as he was preparing to do a painting. He would have a photo session with whoever the subject of a painting was and would literally take dozens, if not hundreds, of Polaroids of these individual sitters,” he said. One such person — whose photos and paintings are featured in the exhibit — is local art collector SuSu Sosnick of Birmingham. In September of 1981, she and her late husband, Robert Sosnick, decided to commission Warhol to paint her portrait. After flying off to meet with him at his personal apartment in Paris, the couple had a daylong photo session with Warhol — who took more than 100 Polaroids of SuSu, later to be used for the creation of a painting. The exhibit also showcases the king of late 20th-century pop’s famous screen-printed works in regional collections, including the iconic “Campbell’s Soup I” and “Electric Chair Series,” and his later “Ten Jews of the Twentieth Century” and “Endangered Species.” “The earliest set in the series, and the image that, of course, established Warhol’s reputation, was the Campbell’s soup can. For that moment, in the ‘60s, it was unheard of for somebody to create high art out of something as lowly as a can of soup, but he turned it into this iconic image that has come to represent that whole era,” Wittkopp said. The final component of “Andy Warhol: Grand Slam” focuses on Warhol’s career as a maker of art through the presentation of a new film by Warhol each week in the Center Gallery. In addition to works from The Andy Warhol Museum and Cranbrook Art Museum, the exhibition includes loans from the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the private collections of Robert and Lisa Katzman, Marc Schwartz, SuSu Sosnick and Richard Weisman. General admission for “Andy Warhol: Grand Slam” is $10 for adults and $5 for teens and full-time students with an ID. Children under 12 are admitted for free. For more information, call (877) 462-7262 or visit www.cranbrook.edu. You can reach Staff Writer Mary Beth Almond at mal mond@candgnews.com or at (586) 498-1060. |
