Andy Warhol's Peculiar 100-Part Group Portrait

Andy Warhol, Portraits of the Artists, 1967. Screenprints on 100 polystyrene boxes, each box 50 x 50 mm, overall 696 x 696 mm including frame. On view at the Wadsworth Atheneum, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine. Photo: 16 Miles

In 1967, New York dealer Leo Castelli hosted an exhibition to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Upper East Side gallery. Each of his artists contributed work to the show, and Andy Warhol (who came to the gallery late, after having two shows at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery), put together a series of portraits, in a variety of sizes, of 12 Castelli artists: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Cy Twombly, Lee Bontecou, Larry Poons, John Chamberlain, and Warhol himself.

Some of the works in the show were quite small, which turns out to have been an bit unfortunate. Explaining the works, Volume 2 of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné notes: “According to the Castelli inventory, several were stolen from the exhibit.” Thankfully for collectors, Warhol also made a rather unusual multiple of 10 of the portraits on polystyrene boxes. Each set of 100 boxes, featuring 10 portraits of each artist, were sold in a numbered edition of 200, plus 25 lettered copies.

I know that it’s been a bit Wadsworth Atheneum-heavy around here recently, but it turns out that it has one of the Portraits of the Artists multiples on display, which is easily one of the strangest pieces that Warhol ever produced and is worth a post. I'd never seen the work before, so when I returned home, I did a lot of Internet-searching and discovered something odd: every edition appeared to be configured differently. The Wadsworth's has the artists in horizontal rows; elsewhere, they are arranged vertically or even scattered about. Here are a sampling. (Note: If you want to try to identify each of the Castelli artists in the Wadsworth’s Atheneum piece, above, I have included the list, top to bottom, at the end of this post.)


Photo: Alan Brown Gallery


Photo: Christie's


Photo: Honolulu Academy of Arts


Photo: Christie's

Perplexed, I contacted Patricia Hickson, the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum, who consulted the work's object file. One of the notes in the file read: "Curiously, although Portraits in part of an edition of 200, the order and direction of the artists' images and the color bands vary among the serigraphs in the edition." But here is where things get especially interesting. Hickson explained that the work's frame can be opened, and the boxes can be rearranged, accounting for the differences in all of the images online. The work at the Wadsworth, though, has not been reconfigured since it was donated by super collectors (and serious Castelli clients) Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine in 1977.

Earlier this month, I was going on and on about the mutability of Warhol's sculptures, about the fact that, if you happen to own a set of Brillo boxes, you can arrange the pieces any way you like. Here, Warhol has taken that idea to the next level. When the Brillo boxes are sold or moved, they lose their previous arrangement. But in Portrait of the Artists, the work itself records how collectors chose to configure the work. Which leads to a few questions: did the Tremaines rearrange their copy, or does the work they donated to the Wadsworth show how Warhol originally displayed the work? (Or was was each copy sold in a different configuration?) Does it even matter what the original layout looked like?


Photo: Phillips de Pury & Company

A final question: who was cut from the 12 artists whose portraits were featured in the Castelli anniversary show in order to make a group of 10 plastic boxes? This, at least, we have an answer to, thanks to the Catalogue. It turns out that Warhol removed Twombly and Chamberlain. Which is interesting: Chamberlain was one of his favorite artists (Warhol collected his work), but he may have been a bit tired of Chamberlian’s portrait, having traded 316 — yes, 316 — copies of it to Chamberlain in exchange for a metal sculpture called Jackpot. (Chamberlain assembled 315 of the portraits into a single rectangular work that he called 315 Johns.) As for what is going on with the wood frame of one of the examples sold at Christie's, I don't even want to think about it.

Key: The artists in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s piece (shown at top), in order from top to bottom: Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol.

The Panther 21 and the New York Art World in the Village Voice Archive

Advertisement in the Village Voice, April 2, 1970

What was the New York art world up to 40 years ago this month? Thanks to Google's handy Village Voice archive, it's easy to find out. According to this advertisement, it looks like a fair number of artist's were busy raising money for the Panther 21 — the radicals arrested in December 1969 and charged with plotting to kill police officers and blow up buildings that included police stations and — a somewhat more unusual target — the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Thirteen people were eventually brought to trial and all of them were acquitted.

Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein's cocktail party in support of the group's legal defense fund at his "elegant Park Avenue duplex" is mentioned in the Times, but I'd never heard of this exhibition before. The list of artists is pretty fascinating, uniting an unlikely group that included Elaine de Kooning and Lee Lozano, Alice Neel and Donald Judd. Frank Stella, Nancy Spero, "Jim" Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and the adventurous gallerist John Weber were also involved. (You can click the image above to see the full list — and more surprises.)

There's probably a tidy little book (or at least a lengthy essay) to be written about the charity auctions and exhibitions held in the New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s. Paula Cooper famously opened her SoHo in 1968 with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. There must be more.

Krauss on Fried on Stella

One day while the show, "Three American Painters" was hanging at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, Michel Fried and I were standing in one of the galleries. To our right was a copper painting by Frank Stella, its surface burnished by the light which flooded the room. A Harvard student who had entered the gallery approached us. With his left arm raised and his finger pointing to the Stella, he confronted Michael Fried. "What's so good about that?" he demanded. Fried looked back at him. "Look," he said slowly, "there are days when Stella goes to the Metropolitan Museum. And he sits for hours looking at the Velázquez, utterly knocked out by them and then he goes back to his studio. What he would like more than anything else is to paint like Velázquez. But what he knows is that that is an option that is not open to him. So he paints stripes." Fried's voice had risen. "He wants to be like Velázquez so he paints stripes."

- Rosalind Krauss, "A View of Modernism," Artforum Vol. 11, No. 1 (April 1972), p. 48-51.

Blogging October 1 - The End of Painting in 1981

“The End of Painting”
Volume 016: Art World Follies, Spring 1981
Douglas Crimp

Why has painted reached an end? Crimp teases and hints at possibilities throughout his landmark essay. He quotes extensively from Daniel Buren’s [pictured] most polemic moments, Gerhard Richter’s most enigmatic (“… basically painting is pure idiocy.”), and William Rubin, who broached the subject while head of MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture in 1974.

Rubin attempts to categorize and understand the break: “Perhaps the dividing line will be seen as between those works which essentially continue an easel painting concept that grew up associated with bourgeois liberal democratic life and was involved with the development of private collections as well as the museum concept – between this and, let us say, Earthworks, Conceptual works and related endeavors, which want another environment (or should want it) and, perhaps, another public.”

The reader is left to believe that today’s avant-garde has successfully foreclosed on the legacy of modernism, rendering its easel paintings dead. It’s an optimistic vision of revolution. Of course, the last twenty-five years have repudiated Crimp’s (and Rubin’s) theory. Indeed, it’s particularly ironic that they write immediately preceding the explosion in painting (speculation) of the 1980s that continues, largely unabated, into the present day.

To discern why his theory failed, it's necessary to see how he understands the twin forces he sees motivating the rise of modernism in the nineteenth century – socio-economics (the triumph of bourgeois democracy) and technology (the creation of photography) – which he suggests underpin today’s shift. There are clear, troubling breaks in this parallel.

Unlike the nineteenth century, which saw the development of class-consciousnesses throughout European society and the concomitant cultivation of “compromise institutions” like museums meant to align the interests of the bourgeoisie with the masses, there is no such rupture today. Bourgeois economic (and political) power has become only more deeply entrenched in late era capitalism. Class consciousness - if it has made any move at all - has only receded. Elite capital has enjoyed success, as evidenced by the incredible proliferation of hedge funds and private equity firms (to say nothing of art consultants) used to sustain and grow bourgeois wealth.

On the technological front, despite obvious advancements in communication, Crimp can’t cite a destabilizing innovation that has brought about a systematic shift in thought. That’s because there haven’t been any epistemic-worthy events to foment such a change. Photography - the great medium of modernity - has taken on an aura (even if only of a type) as original prints enter the best collections at the highest prices.


Painting is alive and well. To argue that even some of its contemporary manifestations aren't interesting and worthwhile is simple stubbornness and naivety. If there has been an epistemic shift in high art, something I wouldn’t dispute, it’s in the content of painting, not their relation to the marketplace. Crimp wants to use Foucault to declare easel painting dead. He should just be happy that the subject has changed.

With that said, the real joy in reading “The End of Painting” is witnessing Crimp’s methodical, almost joyous takedown of critic Barbara Rose, whom he casually paints as a dilettante and ties mercilessly to the pages of Vogue; Richard Hennessy whom he portrays as her lackey; and Frank Stella (Rose's husband!), at whom he hurls just about every insult he can generate – claiming that each of his late works “... reads as a tantrum, shrieking and sputtering that the end of painting has not come.” ["End of Painting Stella" above, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, 1959. "Sputtering Stella" to the left, Bilbimtesirol I, 1995.]