![]() When I recently told a culturally literate friend of mine that there would soon be an entire museum devoted to Warhol, he was appalled, and his reaction is not unique. Yet Warhol remains one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated art-makers of the postwar era. I can think of no American artist of this century who has done more to change our very conception of what art is and how it can operate in the world, and certainly none is more famous. The exhibition space is enormous - roughly equivalent to that of the entire Whitney Museum of American Art, whose former director, Tom Armstrong, is now the director of the Andy Warhol Museum. The museum will fully occupy an 88,000 square-foot building that has been redesigned by Richard Gluckman, Dia's architect. The Warhol Foundation is giving the museum 844 paintings and sculptures, 1,528 drawings, 576 prints, and an initial group of 423 photographs - $75 million worth of art, according to Archibald Gillies, the director of the foundation, about 30%, by value, of the work left to the estate. Dia is donating 80 paintings, and loaning Shadows (1978), a 102-panel work. Dia and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (the beneficiary of all of Warhol's remaining art, and virtually all of his assets) are providing the art, and the Carnegie the administration. (When Dia was still being run by its founders Philippa de Menil and Heiner Friedrich, there were plans to open a Warhol museum on Franklin Street, in a building that has since changed hands several times in a curious twist, that building is now the home of the New York Academy of Art, a school dedicated to a kind of traditional figuration antithetical to Warhol's art.) Wright couldn't get his project funded, but soon he was joined by Fred Hughes, the executor of Warhol's estate, and eventually by the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh to form a comprehensive Warhol institution. The Andy Warhol Museum was begun as an attempt by Charles Wright, director of the Dia Center for the Arts, to find a permanent home for his organisation's extraordinary collection of early hand-painted Warhols from the early 60s, Disasters and Skulls, each of which had been the subject of a separate exhibition at Dia's Wooster Street facility, which now houses Printed Matter, the artists' book store. There is no Georgia O'Keeffe museum, no Jackson Pollock museum, no Jasper Johns museum. This new institution is a formidable one. I imagine if one were searching for such claims, both the Picasso museum in Paris and the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam could produce similarly impressive superlatives, but the point is clear. According to the Warhol museum staff, theirs is the most comprehensive single-artist institution in the world. ![]() Gaudens come to mind - but as far as I can tell, Warhol is the first American artist of this country to be so honoured other than Norman Rockwell, the master of Hallmark sentimentalia. The studios or homes of several 19th century painters have been converted into museums - Frederick Church and Augustus St. The United States is short on single-artist museums. This last thought could be called the mantra of the new Andy Warhol Museum. ![]() ![]() The analogy resonates with ironies: of the shooting of the President as the sort of American tragedy that made Warhol famous of the mourning Jackie Kennedy as one of Warhol's most enduring images of the artist's own near fatal shooting several years later, one day before Kennedy's brother Robert was himself shot to death of the likelihood that after Kennedy, Warhol is the most identifiable presence in American history since the 60s of the thought that Warhol's work, like Kennedy's murder, is not as simple as it may have been made to seem. But even though the building is sheathed in glazed terracotta, I'll hold on to my first impression of the home of the new Andy Warhol Museum as a more fanciful cousin of the building from which, according to the official story, President Kennedy was killed. In truth, the Frick & Lindsay, which is just a block and a bridge away from downtown Pittsburgh, has a more decorative facade than the standard warehouse. Maybe it's my own insensitivity to architecture, but at first glance the Frick & Lindsay building (also known as Volkwein Music & Instruments Co.) reminded me of the Book Depository building in Dallas.
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