Reality Show: Warhol’s Motion Pictures at the MoMA

Long before “The Situation” and his kind entered the zeitgeist, Andy Warhol filmed his own reality show featuring his personal constellation of “Superstars”—artists, musicians, poets, actors, models, and sometimes just people hungry to be in the spotlight who ranged from being Warhol’s friends to mere acquaintances. In Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, currently at the MoMA through March 21, 2011, these wannabes and never weres finally hit the big time in an exhibition that seems almost mundanely modern if it weren’t more than 40 years old. In looking at Warhol’s prescient reality programming, we see the roots of our current obsession with watching other people simply being themselves and with wanting to be watched ourselves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Reality Show."

[Image: Andy Warhol. Screen Test: Baby Jane Holzer (1964). 16mm film (black and white, silent). 4 min. at 16fps. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.]

[Many thanks to the MoMA for providing me with the image above and press materials for Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, which runs through March 21, 2011.]

Easy Rider: Dennis Hopper at the MOCA

“It gives you a whole new way of looking at the day,” Dennis Hopper’s character Billy says in the unforgettable film, Easy Rider, which the then 33-year-old Hopper also directed. Billy had marijuana in mind when he said those words, but the same could be said of Hopper’s photography and painting. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles presents Dennis Hopper: Double Standard, the first comprehensive survey of Hopper’s art. Hopper, who passed away on May 29^th of this year, never fit into a neat category as an actor or director. His art shares that same elusive quality of boundarilessness born of great breadth and versatility. Hopper rides easily through whatever media he chooses to express himself in, always giving you a new way of looking at the day. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Easy Rider."

[Image: Dennis Hopper, Double Standard, 1961, gelatin silver print, © The Estate of Dennis Hopper, image courtesy of The Estate of Dennis Hopper and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.]



[Many thanks to the The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for providing me with the image above and press materials for Dennis Hopper: Double Standard, which runs through September 26, 2010.]

Foreign Report: A New, Italian Take on Edward Hopper

Leave it to an Italian art publisher to do an American artist right. Skira’s Edward Hopper, distributed in the United States by Rizzoli, may be the finest single volume visually and critically on the elusive yet irresistible 20^th century artist. The familiar paintings are all there, but explorations into Hopper’s drawings, his subtle eroticism, his European influences, and even his influence on filmmaking add a whole new dimension, giving us the fullest picture of Hopper possible, all in one of the most beautiful publishing packages imaginable. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Foreign Report."

[Many thanks to Rizzoli USA for providing me with a review copy of Edward Hopper.]

Print the Legend: “Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey” at the NGA, London

In the classic Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart’s character confesses that he wasn’t a hero only to hear the newspaper man he’s confessed to respond, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." When Lady Jane Grey met her end on the executioner’s block in 1554 after once serving for nine days as the Queen of England, the facts of her death soon became a legend of martyrdom. Nearly three centuries later, French artist Paul Delaroche revisited the legend in his 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (pictured), which became the sensation of the 1834 Salon exhibition. In Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, the National Gallery of Art in London reexamines that moment in history when a French artist used the legend of an English monarch to say something both about art and about French society in the nineteenth century. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Print the Legend."

[Image: Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833. Oil on canvas © The National Gallery, London.]



[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art in London for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, which runs through May 23.]