Andy Warhol: Camouflage, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

Andy Warhol: Camouflage

Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

October 30, 2010 — February 5, 2011

Honor Fraser presents Andy Warhol: Camouflage, an exhibition that includes silkscreens on canvas, unique trial proofs on board, and screenprints. This marks the first comprehensive west coast exhibition, in over ten years, of Andy Warhol's late series, the Camouflage works. The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with an essay by Vincent Fremont. Please find excerpts from his essay below.

While Andy Warhol was still alive, I can only remember on one occasion that a Camouflage painting of his was exhibited. It was a 72 x 72-inch fluorescent, hot-pink, and yellow version that was included in a group show in 1986 at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City.

The Camouflage paintings were not shown publicly until six years after Andy's death. In September of 1993, with the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Foundation, an exhibition entitled Andy Warhol Abstrakt opened at the Kuntshalle in Basel, Switzerland. For the first time ever, large Camouflage paintings measuring from 50 x 198-inches to 116 x 420-inches were presented in a groundbreaking and intriguing survey of the work resulting from Andy's interpretation and experimentation with abstract painting.

The Camouflage paintings were a personal vision of Andy's. No gallery had commissioned him to create these paintings for an exhibition. It all started in 1986 when Andy asked his art assistant, Jay Shriver (who was also an artist) what he was working on. Andy had agreed to let Jay work four days a week as long as Jay created artwork in his own studio on his day off. Jay told Andy that he was making small abstract paintings by pushing paint through the mesh of a piece of military camouflage cloth. Andy immediately realized making paintings of the actual camouflage shapes and patterns would be a great idea. He sent Jay off to the local Army/Navy store on Fifth Avenue near Union Square to buy some camouflage fabric. When Jay returned they photographed the cloth and the project began. Andy had the mesh pattern removed from the pictures of the camouflage cloth so just the shapes remained. Andy had a good experience creating this series of Camouflage paintings; from the very large-scale to the very small-scale versions measuring only 9 x 9-inches. He was so pleased with the results of the paintings he decided to publish his own limited edition of Camouflage prints.

Andy asked Rupert Smith, the printer who had also worked on the paintings, to make trial proofs for the print edition. Rupert made eighty-four 38 x 38-inch trial proofs and Andy selected eight to be printed, with the same colors and imagery, for the regular and artist proof editions. Each of the 84 trial proofs is unique, one of a kind, and that is what makes them extraordinary, especially within the Camouflage series.

This exhibition offers a rare chance and arguably the first chance to see a group of Camouflage paintings paired with a group of Camouflage trial proofs.

HONOR FRASER GALLERY

2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034

www.honorfraser.com 

Jacob Lawrence: Silkscreens, Tyler Museum of Art

Jacob Lawrence: Silkscreens

Tyler Museum of Art

February 7 – April 28, 2002

The the Tyler Museum of Art presents "Jacob Lawrence: Silkscreens". The exhibition is comprised of two series: "The Legend of John Brown" and "Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis". The works are from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Walter O. Evans of Savannah, Georgia. The Walter O. Evans Collection contains material spanning 150 years and is widely regarded as one of the finest collections of African American art in the United States.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was an African American artist who wove color, shape, history and sociology into emotionally powerful images. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917, Lawrence's family moved to Harlem in 1930 when the area still resonated with the colorful ambience and intellectual and artistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. With a full-time job and concern for her children's welfare, Lawrence's mother enrolled him at Utopia House, an after-school center for children. It was here that Jacob Lawrence entered a painting class taught by Charles Alston, later a notable painter himself but then an arts education student at Teacher's College.

"They didn't tell me what to do, how to draw, or what to paint," Lawrence once remembered. "They gave me materials and ideas on how to experiment, and left me alone to create out of my imagination." At the age of fifteen, Jacob Lawrence attended the College Art Association classes held at the Harlem Art Workshop, where he studied with Charles Alston (1907-1972), the director. Lawrence showed so much promise that he continued his studies with the painter and sculptor Henry Bannarn (1910-1965) at the Works Progress Administration classes held in Harlem. For eighteen months, he participated in the WPA Federal Arts Project.

Jacob Lawrence was in his early twenties when he produced his first series on black history. The Toussaint L'Ouverture series was created in 1937-38, the Frederick Douglas series in 1938-39, and Harriet Tubman in 1940. Lawrence received almost overnight acclaim when his Migration of the Negro series was shown at New York's prestigious Downtown Gallery in 1941. With this exhibition, Lawrence became the first black artist to be represented by a New York gallery. He was only twenty-four years old. That same month, Fortune magazine reproduced twenty-six of the series' sixty panels in color accompanied by a lengthy article.

It was also in 1941 that Jacob Lawrence created the gouaches (opaque watercolors) of the "John Brown" series. John Brown (1800-1859) was the son of deeply religious, Calvinist parents who taught their children that slavery was a sin against God. John Brown went on to become the most dedicated and famous abolitionist in American history, best known for the ill-fated attack he led on the United States Armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia.) His exploits were extolled by numerous artists and writers, all of whom contributed to the making of the John Brown legend. Jacob Lawrence's series of twenty-two gouaches, in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, is widely considered to be one of the most powerful depictions of the abolitionist's heroic, yet controversial life.

By the 1970s the twenty-two paintings were showing signs of serious deterioration. In an effort to preserve the work, the Detroit Institute of Art contracted with the silkscreen workshop of Ives-Sillman to produce limited-edition print portfolios, with Jacob Lawrence acting as artistic consultant. Though the principal reason for the project was the preservation of Lawrence's original imagery, the "Legend of John Brown" prints are not the result of an attempt to faithfully duplicate the images in the gouache paintings. No effort was made to match original colors or textures, and the silkscreen prints in this series thus exhibit a considerable degree of stylistic autonomy. The Tyler Museum of Art is presenting this series of twenty-two prints to the public.

"Eight Studies for The Book of Genesis", executed in 1989-90, was inspired by events in Lawrence's youth. The artist stated: "I was baptized in the Abyssinian Baptist Church [in Harlem] in about 1932. There I attended church, I attended Sunday School, and I remember the ministers giving very passionate sermons pertaining to the Creation. This was over fifty years ago, and you know, these things stay with you even though you don't realize what an impact these experiences are making on you at the time. As I was doing the series I think that this was in the back of my mind, hearing the minister talk about these things." The Tyler Museum of Art presents six of these silkscreens along with "The Legend of John Brown" prints.

TYLER MUSEUM OF ART

1300 South Mahon, Tyler, Texas 75701

www.tylermuseum.org