The Whitney Museum of American Art is set to mount the first U.S. museum retrospective of Andy Warhol’s work since 1989. Curated by Donna de Salvo, who knew Warhol and oversaw two shows of his work when he was alive, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again will feature more than 350 works of art, many assembled together for the first time. The museum said the exhibit, opening Nov. 12 in New York City, would “unite all aspects, media, and periods of Warhol’s 40-year career.”
While the exhibition will include Warhol’s famous Pop pieces from the 1960s, De Salvo told The New York Times it would also feature lesser-known pieces from the 1970s and ’80s. It will also include explicitly gay-related pieces, such as when, on the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Warhol presented portraits based on FBI criminal mug shots with the double entendre title Most Wanted Men. “His insertion into a highly public space of something that had this very homoerotic aspect is a pretty radical gesture,” De Salvo told The Times. “Perhaps more than any artist before or since, Andy Warhol understood America’s defining twin desires for innovation and conformity, public visibility and absolute privacy,” De Salvo said in a Whitney press statement. “He transformed these contradictory impulses into a completely original art that, I believe, has profoundly influenced how we see and think about the world now.” The Whitney exhibition will run through March 31, 2019. It will then travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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