Photo: Richard Avedon. Audrey Hepburn, actress, New York, January 20, 1967.
“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion,” the great American photographer Richard Avedon observed. He, who helped to elevate American fashion and portrait photography to a fine art, further revealed, “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
Also: Exhibit | Warhol by the Book
Perhaps this is what makes the portrait artist a singular archetype, one who is capable of engaging and rendering the spirit of a person in their visage, forever frozen in a singular moment that speaks to the ephemeral and the eternal in equal part. Like Avedon, Andy Warhol also possessed the gift to articulate his subjects in two dimensions with grace, ease, and skill. Both Avedon and Warhol were legends in their own time, aware of the ability that possessed to shape and define the zeitgeist. Subjects flocked eagerly, keen join the pantheon who sat for the great masters of the mid-twentieth century. In celebration, Gagosian London presents the first major exhibition to pair their works in Avedon Warhol, on view at Gagosian Gallery, London, now through April 23, 2016.
Andy Warhol, Miriam Davidson, 1965, Spray paint and silkscreen on canvas, 80 1/4 x 80 1/2 inches. Private collection.
Avedon and Warhol traveled along parallel paths, originating in modest beginnings and rising to superstar status in postwar America. They both began working for major magazines in New York in the 1940s, using the experience, exposure, and connections to build solid foundations. Portraiture was a shared focus, and they both made use of repetition and serialization in their work, using strong, formal properties to articulate their understanding of their subjects. As Avedon and Warhol became successful, their artistic styles began to mature, taking on themes including social and political power, examining the milieu in which they worked.
The works in Avedon Warhol, which date from the 1950s through the 1990s, examine the glamour and despair of celebrity, as well as the inevitability of mortality. The exhibition juxtaposes The Family (1976), Avedon’s ambitious conceptual portrayal of 68 individuals at the epicenter of American politics of that time with Warhol’s monumental portrait of Mao Tse-tung, Mao (1972), drawing attention to the commonalities they share across cultural and ideological boundaries.
Richard Avedon. Louis Armstrong, musician, Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, May 3, 1955.
In 1969, the legends crossed paths for Avedon’s iconic portrait, Andy Warhol and members of The Factory. This larger-than-lifesize mural showcased the New York underground in all its decadent glory, embodying the spirit of the cultural revolution that Warhol helped engineer. Just a few years later, in 1975, Warhol was making silkscreens of drag queens in a series he titled Ladies and Gentlemen.
Celebrity was a subject both artists enjoyed, for it brought to them some of the greatest figures of the times, and together they made history, for in the age of mass reproduction few things have been as seductive as the infinite times an image can be shared, becoming a shared part of the public consciousness. The exhibition pairs Avedon’s portraits of Brigitte Bardot (1959) and Audrey Hepburn (1967) are paired with Warhol’s Double Elvis (1963) and Four Marilyns (Reversal Series) (1986).
Andy Warhol, Liza Minelli, 1979, Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 40 x 40 inches.
Avedon revealed, “I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller–to find out how they are. So they’re dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise, there’s nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it’s unearned. It has no past…no future. And when the sitting is over—when the picture is done—there’s nothing left except the photograph.”
Credits: Photographs by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS(, New York.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
