Avedon Warhol, Britannia Street, London, February 9–April 23, 2016

Installation view

All Richard Avedon artworks © The Richard Avedon Foundation
All Andy Warhol artworks © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundaiton for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo by Mike Bruce

Installation view

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Works Exhibited

Left: Richard Avedon Audrey Hepburn, actress, New York, January 20, 1967, 1967

Gelatin silver print 13 3/4 × 11 inches (34.9 × 27.9 cm) © The Richard Avedon Foundation Right: Andy Warhol Miriam Davidson, 1965 Spray paint and silkscreen ink on canvas 80 1/4 × 80 1/2 inches (203.8 × 204.5 cm) Private collection © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Left: Richard Avedon Charles Chaplin, Actor, New York, September 13, 1952, 1952–55

Gelatin silver print 41 × 66 inches (104.1 × 167.6 cm) © The Richard Avedon Foundation Right: Andy Warhol Skull, 1976 Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 72 × 80 1/8 inches (182.9 × 203.5 cm) The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Left: Richard Avedon Bianca Jagger, actress, Hollywood, CA, January 25, 1972, 1972

Gelatin silver print 56 × 44 inches (142.2 × 111.8 cm) © The Richard Avedon Foundation Right: Andy Warhol Tina Freeman, 1975 Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 40 × 40 inches (101.6 × 101.6 cm) Private Collection © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Left: Richard Avedon Louis Armstrong, musician, Newport Jazz Fesitival, Newport, Rhode Island, May 3, 1955, 1955

Gelatin silver print 52 × 44 inches (132.1 × 111.8 cm) © The Richard Avedon Foundation Right: Andy Warhol Liza Minelli, 1976 Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 40 × 40 inches (101.6 × 101.6 cm) The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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About

My camera and I, together we have the power to confer or to take away.
—Richard Avedon

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—Andy Warhol

Gagosian London is pleased to present the first major exhibition to pair works by Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol. Both artists rose to prominence in postwar America with parallel artistic output that occasionally overlapped. Their most memorable images, produced in response to changing cultural mores, are icons of the twentieth century.

Portraiture was a shared focus of both artists, and they made use of repetition and serialization: Avedon through the reproducible medium of photography, and in his group photographs, for which he meticulously positioned, collaged, and reordered images; Warhol in his method of stacked screenprinting, which enabled the consistent reproduction of an image. Avedon’s distinctive gelatin-silver prints and Warhol’s boldly colored silkscreens variously depict many of the same recognizable faces, including Marella Agnelli, Bianca Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Rudolf Nureyev.

Both Avedon and Warhol came from modest beginnings and had tremendous commercial success working for major magazines in New York beginning in the 1940s. The 1960s marked artistic turning points for both artists as they increasingly moved away from strictly commercial work toward their mature independent styles. The works in the exhibition, which date from the 1950s through the 1990s, emphasize such common themes as social and political power, the evolving acceptance of cultural differences, the inevitability of mortality, and the glamour and despair of celebrity.

Each gallery will juxtapose works that underscore these themes, beginning with The Family (1976), Avedon’s ambitious conceptual portrayal of sixty-nine individuals at the epicenter of American politics at the time, together with Warhol’s monumental portrait of the revolutionary Mao Tse-tung, Mao (1972). In both works, little emotion or expression is revealed in the sitters’ faces or postures. Such deadpan was a mark of Pop art ambivalence, more commonly associated with Warhol but equally applicable in this instance to Avedon.

Both artists sought out individuals who were outside, as well as inside, the mainstream. For Avedon, this resulted in the larger-than-life-size mural of Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory (1969), who represented the heart of New York subculture and incarnated the sexual and cultural revolution. Meanwhile, Warhol memorialized the beauty of drag queens—whom he once described as “ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood”—in his pioneering series of silkscreens, Ladies and Gentlemen (1975).

The third gallery contains an extended meditation on the darker side of human existence, as well as its potential salvation: Warhol’s Skull and Guns paintings are juxtaposed with photographs from Avedon’s Brandenburg Gate portfolio, taken during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Finally, celebrity was a topic that was equally explored by both artists: Avedon in his iconic images of Brigitte Bardot (1959) and Audrey Hepburn (1967), and Warhol in his dramatically rendered superstars, such as Double Elvis (1963) and Four Marilyns (Reversal Series) (1986). Driven by their cosmopolitan awareness and mindfulness of the potential for their work to provoke change, as well as their diverse cast of modern muses, Avedon and Warhol harnessed the power of images to reflect the revolutionary social attitudes of their time.

A fully illustrated publication accompanying the exhibition will include essays by Michael Bracewell and Ara H. Merjian, as well as a chronology documenting the artists’ careers and points of intersection.

From the Quarterly

Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol at Paris Apartment Window, 1981

In Conversation
Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.

Andy Warhol: Silver Screen

In this video, Jessica Beck, director at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, sits down to discuss the three early paintings by Andy Warhol from 1963 featured in the exhibition Andy Warhol: Silver Screen, at Gagosian in Paris.

portrait of a person staring directly at the camera

Everywhere Light

Jake Skeets reflects on Richard Avedon’s series In the American West, focusing on the portrait of his uncle, Benson James.

Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2023

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023

The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.

10-image exposure of Marilyn Monroe in different poses

Avedon 100

In celebration of the centenary of Richard Avedon’s birth, more than 150 artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and representatives of the fashion world were asked to select a photograph by Avedon for an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, and to elaborate on the ways in which image and artist have affected them. We present a sampling of these images and writings.

Alexander Calder poster for McGovern, 1972, lithograph

The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters

Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.