Andy Warhol aside Polaroids of Caroline Ireland
Artist
Rowland Scherman
(American, born 1937)
Date1979, printed 2008
Mediumdigital inkjet print
Dimensionsimage: 45.2 × 66 cm (17 13/16 × 26 in.)
sheet: 61.2 × 76.3 cm (24 1/8 × 30 1/16 in.)
sheet: 61.2 × 76.3 cm (24 1/8 × 30 1/16 in.)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineGift of Howard G. Davis, III A.K.A. David Davis
Object number2011.162
Label TextThe dominant figure in the American Pop Art style of the 1960s, Warhol (1928–1987) challenged viewers to focus on the visual aspects of banal everyday objects. He was obsessed by the way advertising and pictorial media generated celebrity culture.
Warhol became a media star by design, and founded Interview Magazine in 1969. He photographed the rich and famous with his Polaroid camera, later reworking these casual images into exclusive, costly portrait paintings. In this photograph, The Polaroid photographs beside Warhol represent Caroline Ireland, part of a portrait commission included in a Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art, called “Portraits of the 70s”. The exhibition received searing reviews from critics.
In the process of creating his iconic portraits, Warhol would take roughly 200 photographs of his desired subject, the best of which would be sent away for enlargement and made into a silkscreen.
In 1979, Birmingham, Alabama art collectors Charles and Caroline Ireland commissioned Warhol to create two portraits of each of them. The array of instant photographs on the table next to Warhol are some of the preparatory snapshots of Caroline. Working from a sea of nearly identical images, Warhol effectively transformed Ireland into a reproduction before rendering her portrait
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