Industrial-strength Warhol - Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Cover Story

The newly lay opened Andy Warhol Museum, with the country's largest single-artist collection, provides a mixture of cultural nostalgia and curatorial surprises--and a potential mould for 21st-century museums.

Pittsburgh is probably not your first thinking for a fun-loving touristic weekend. on the contrary now that the Andy Warhol Museum has make opened in a converted industrial building upon the city's North Side, Pittsburgh has become, in individual fell swoop, a contemporary art destination of the first importance. The Warhol Museum, housed in the handsome 1911 Frick & Lindsay Building, a terra-cotta, tile-clad warehouse just across the Allegheny River from downtown, is many things at once: a snazzy design thing a scholarly repository, a novel hangout and the largest single-artist museum in the United States.

Designed by the agency of Richard Gluckman, who is well known for his conversion of a similar industrial building, the Dia Center for the Arts upon West 22nd Street in Manhattan, the Warhol Museum marks the apotheosis of the loft space in contemporary museum design. abundant larger than Dia's 40,000-square-foot, four-story building, the Pittsburgh facility encompasses 73000 square-feet, eight stories (including the basement) and a fresh 15,000-square-foot, four-story addition which houses a small theater, offices and storage space. While it makes no attempt to replicate any of Warhol's Factories, Gluckman's design plays on the factory allusion in its use of stiff industrial materials like aluminum for the stair rails and black tiles to sheath the theater extension.

The museum boasts a staggering collection of the artist's work: 900 paintings, 77 statuarys 1,500 drawings, 500-plus print and 400 photographs, as well as collaborative works and samples of Warhol's film and video production. (Warhol's major films are in the proces of being restored at the Museum of fresh Art in New York.) The museum's holdings also include Warhol's designs for volumes and wallpaper (three types have been refabricated for the museum) and 600 of the day-by-day ephemera boxe known as Time Capsules, which will be part of the museum's archives and stubborn center. Approximately 500 works, including a small in number important loans, are on view for the opening presentation, which will be up for a year.

The museum tenders a unique opportunity to view Warhol's work in a whole of recent origin context, namely the rough and pitch about gritty yet glamorous Industrial Age city where he was born in 1928 and lived until 1949 when he left for of recent origin York. The museum's public-relations team has worked hard to portray the establishment of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh as exquisitely natural--a kind of "hometown stripling makes good" story. Carnegie Magazine, a local smooth and shining published by the Carnegie Institute, which administers the Warhol Museum, ran an article upon "Two Andys from Pittsburgh," comparing and contrasting the lives of sum of two units immigrants to the city, the Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie and the first-generation Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant Warhol.[1] (The artist was in fact educated at the Carnegie Institute and Carnegie Tech the great learning facilities that the industrialist baseed and also painted a posthumous portrait of Carnegie in 1981) In the handsome catalogue published by means of the Warhol Museum, one of the greatest in quantity touching and informative essays is a detailed reminiscence by means of a former classmate of Warhol's at Carnegie Tech the artist Bennard B Perlman. In it we learn that the essential uncompounded bodys of Warhol's art--his revival of history painting, his fascination with portraiture (which stretch outed to self-portraiture in drag), his obsession with fashion, his vast debt to his mother, who was herself an artist and an early collaborator--all trunk from his education in Pittsburgh. In the local pres coverage, single the local gay magazine Planet strange sounded a dissenting note in its tabloid headline: "Largest Gay Museum lay opens But the Museum can't handle the fact the [sic] Andy Warhol was a queer!" The article went upon to insist, "The museum should engross a gay art historian to assist in putting the collection into a more thorough and accurate cultural and historical perspective."[2]

The collection is, for the greatest in quantity part, sensitively installed by the Warhol Museum's curator, Mark Francis, an Englishman best known for his work upon the mammoth multicultural exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" at the middle Pompidou in Paris in 1989 [see A.i.A., May '89] and for his co-curatorship with Lynne Cooke of the 1991 Carnegie International [see A.i.A., June '92] Francis was named director of the Warhol Museum when it was baseed in 1989, before ceding those duties in 1993 to Tom Armstrong, the former director of the pair the Whitney Museum in of recent origin York and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, who is well known for his diplomatic flair and fund-raising abilities. Now, Francis has brought his distinctive European understanding of Warhol's work to bear upon the display of the museum's vast collections. individual of his signal approaches to the complexities of the Warholian oeuvre is to emphasize the way in which all the different mediums interconnect.