'Andy Warhol: The Last Decade' show

'Andy Warhol: The Last Decade' is the first U.S. museum survey to examine the late work of this celebrated American artist. The show is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Encompassing nearly fifty works, the exhibition reveals his vitality, energy, and renewed spirit of experimentation. During this time the Andy Warhol (1928–1987) produced several works, in a considerable number of thematic series format and on a vastly larger scale, than at any other point in his forty-year career. It was a decade of great artistic development for him, during which a dramatic transformation of his style took place alongside the introduction of new techniques.

Andy Warhol continued to expand upon his artistic and business ventures with commissioned portraits, print series, TV productions, and fashion projects, but he also reengaged with painting. In the late 1970s, he developed a renewed interest in abstraction, first with his Oxidations and Shadows series and later with his Yarn, Rorschach, and Camouflage paintings. His return to the hand-painted images in the 1980s was inspired by collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Clemente, and Keith Haring.

The exhibition concludes with his variations on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, one of the largest series of his career. Together, these works provide an important framework for understanding Andy Warhol’s late career by showing how the artist simultaneously incorporated the screened image and pursued a reinvention of painting. The New York Times review mentions:

"Its 45 paintings represent around 1 percent of the more than 3,500 that the Andy Warhol Foundation estimates Warhol produced during his last decade. Still, the show floats a startling idea: Warhol made some of his best paintings during these years. Spurred by his sensitivity to criticism, by the example of younger painters he had influenced and perhaps by his own boredom, he became more fully himself as a painter, retrieving and expanding upon parts of his sensibility left behind in his rush to become Andy Warhol, Pop artist."

'Andy Warhol: The Last Decade' has been curated by Joseph D. Ketner II, Henry and Lois Foster Chair of Contemporary Art, Emerson College, Boston. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Sharon Matt Atkins, Associate Curator of Exhibitions.