Conrad exhibit captures artists on the cusp of the American Pop Art movement

On a chilly afternoon in 1964, Andy Warhol, along with one of his muses, Taylor Mead, photographer William John Kennedy and his wife, Marie, packed into Kennedy's old VW bug. The destination: Queens, N.Y., where Kennedy wanted Warhol to see a lush field of flowers in an industrial part of town.

As soon as the iconic pop artist spotted the blanket of black-eyed Susans, he raced out of the car.

"It electrified him," Kennedy recalled. "He became gleeful. Jumping around."

It was here that Kennedy captured iconic images of Warhol with his large flower works on canvas, standing among the wild, tall bright-yellow Rudbeckias.

"Instant history!" Kennedy proclaimed.

Those photographs will be among 60 exhibited at "Before They Were Famous: Behind the Lens of William John Kennedy," opening this weekend at the Conrad Indianapolis. "Before They Were Famous," featuring photographs of Warhol and Mooresville native Robert Indiana, runs concurrently at the Site/109 gallery in New York.

Many of the negatives were put into sealed boxes, stored and forgotten, only to be rediscovered by Kennedy and his wife during their 1984 move from New York to Miami. A set will become part of the permanent collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, said director Eric Shiner, who described the photos as "incredible."

"They show a side of Warhol that is often not portrayed," he said. "One as the workaholic and then the playful nature of Warhol."

As a photographer capturing the nascent Pop Art movement in New York City, Kennedy met Warhol and Indiana, now best-known as the creator of the iconic "LOVE" sculptures.

Before Pop Art had a name, it was being stretched on canvas, sculpted, molded, and yes, even photographed, in different parts of New York, but mostly in a small corner of Manhattan known as Coenties Slip by the East River.

It was during this time that Kennedy met Indiana, head of the Coenties Slip group, as they were known, a group of artists who inspired the aesthetic cool of the time. Indiana was having a small exhibit in a modest New York gallery.

"We hit it off," Kennedy, now 82, recalled. "I decided I wanted to start photographing leading young artists in the city."

Indiana invited Kennedy up to his studio, where the young photographer couldn't help notice there were no windows -- strange for an artist's studio.

"Don't you have any windows in here?" he asked. His host walked him over to an unfinished brick wall.

"I thought he was nuts." Very carefully, Indiana pulled a single brick from the wall, and bid Kennedy to peek through the opening. "Looking through you could see this marvelous panoramic of the New York City skyline."

And so the magic began.

Just by luck, Kennedy attended an art exhibit in New York where Indiana was sharing space with Warhol. There, Kennedy took the only photographs of the two young pop artists together. Soon after, Warhol called Kennedy and invited him to start photographing him.

"I came so close to dismissing the phone call because of this very slight voice," he said. "I thought at first it was one of my friends playing a trick on me. But then I could feel the seriousness in his voice. I sensed it was the real deal, so I took him up on his invitation."

Warhol summoned him to his Midtown studio, The Factory. "You had to take this creaking old elevator, go up five flights . . . It comes to an abrupt stop on the fifth floor," Kennedy recalled. "Andy is there to meet me at the elevator door. The first thing I noticed was all the art. Everywhere. Every inch of this huge studio is covered in art."

Kennedy and his wife occasionally went to parties at the Factory, though that really wasn't their scene. "It was loaded with many 'hangers-on,' " Marie Kennedy recalled. Besides, Kennedy was busy making his own mark in fine art and commercial photography, eventually shooting for Life magazine, Sports Illustrated, American Express and IBM.

But in 1963, the year before he married Marie, he was just starting out. He paid $70 a month for his rented studio space at 161 W. 23rd St., between 7th and 8th avenues. It was a photographer's dream, with its north light streaming through the 10-foot-by-11-foot window.

"Always from the beginning, my aim was to always be a photojournalist and to have that freedom in my work," he said. Kennedy credits his progressive-thinking aunt, who raised him from the age of 7 in Long Island, N.Y., as cultivating his appreciation of art and photography.

"It was she who exposed me to the terrible world I am involved in. Though I believe I was born with art in my heart."

Kennedy and his wife, who live in Miami, will attend the exhibit's opening at the Conrad. They will be joined in Indianapolis by old friend and Factory superstar Ultra Violet. She will also be showing works and unveiling a fine-art prototype of a 9/11 memorial piece.

Porsche art

Jim Dine

Primary concerns of a pop-art star

RED was one of Roy Lichtenstein's favourite colours. There it is, voluptuously, in his pastiche Nudes series from 1994, especially in the lips and nails of his comic-strip-style women. And yet, master printer Kenneth Tyler says, Lichtenstein never really got the red he wanted. ''We never nailed it,'' he says with disappointment.

Red, of course, is crucial to bright, bold pop art but notoriously difficult in the world of printing - scarlets, crimsons, burgundies, vermilions are tricky to get just right. Tyler should know: he collaborated with Lichtenstein on lithographs, screen prints, linecuts and even reliefs and difficult embossed artworks in the Tyler printing workshops for more than 30 years until the artist's death in 1997.

''Roy started out in painting having paint manufacturers make the red he wanted,'' Tyler says. ''But it was a hard red to come by in printmaking, especially in lithography, to get the right hue and the exact density. We never got as good a red as Roy really wanted - but it wasn't because we didn't try!''

Some of the results of their attempts will go on show at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery next week. There are more than 100 works, all drawn from the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection, which comprises more than 7000 editioned prints, proofs, drawings, paper works, screens and illustrated books as well as a collection of rare candid photography, film and audio. The collection, sold or donated to the NGA, encompasses Tyler's work with big-name artists such as Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Tyler says all these artists, and the challenges offered with their work, were difficult in one way or another. ''They were all wonderful, too. If you're not difficult, you're not worth it.''

Lichtenstein, though, was consistently wonderful to work with - in a printmaking studio, the printer's expertise combined with the artist's creative vision mean that works of art become a collaboration. Lichtenstein, Tyler says, was professional, disciplined and incredibly hard-working but able to make compromises and hard decisions when something wasn't panning out as he hoped.

''He was also wonderful with his [printer] collaborators; he would know their names and what role they played and he would make sure to comment on it and let them know he was pleased,'' Tyler says.

Lichtenstein worked with this highly regarded printer - famous in his own right - at Tyler's Los Angeles and two New York State studios, during which time the pair developed a strong friendship. Of the 5000-plus artworks Lichtenstein produced during his life, several hundred were done with Tyler and his team - so enduring bonds developed as they nutted out the best way to turn the artist's formative drawings into prints.

''Roy was taught printmaking very early in school and those early prints are remarkable, dating back to the 1950s,'' Tyler says. ''He was the only pop artist that had a printmaking background - so when he came to work with us, he … therefore was interested in furthering his knowledge of technique.''

Tyler says the works in the travelling exhibition reveal how, in every project Lichtenstein and he embarked on, the artist would use his growing technical knowledge in a unique way. ''He was able to bridge the idea of different techniques with the talent to actually exploit them,'' he says.

NGA curator Jaklyn Babington, in the catalogue for Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Remix, describes Lichtenstein's work as ''slick, intelligent and humorous'', appropriating as it does from an astonishingly broad array of subject matter: romance and war comics, Ben-Day dot imagery, nudes, Monet's impressionist works, Max Ernst's surrealist art - even a $US10 bill.

His ability to ''identify cultural cliches and to repackage them as monumental remixes'' made his work iconic of 1960s-70s America, Babington says, in effect ''branding'' his work with a distinct ''look'' that many thought was vulgar: a 1964 article in Life magazine was headlined ''Is He the Worst Artist in the US?''.

In the piece, the artist was quoted as saying that the closer his work was to its original source the more threatening it was to the art world: ''I take a cliche and try to organise its forms to make it monumental … the difference is often not great, but it is crucial.''

Babington says the printmaking process helped Lichtenstein explore thoroughly his desire for his art to ''look like it has been programmed''. ''What was threatening about Lichtenstein's work was that on face value it appeared to be commercial design posing as high art,'' she writes. ''His work seemed to announce the erasure of the artist as author, replacing the human creator with the industrial machine.'' Retrospectively, however, she says Lichtenstein's subtle program crystallised as a creative strategy to ''expose the real America to itself''.

Tyler confirms that while Lichtenstein always referred to his work as an ''industrial'' process, he was adamant about doing as much as he could with his own hand. For him, making his preparatory drawings and collages by hand was a way of rendering a comic strip, historical painting or other image source into a parody or cliche, stripping it down so ''it would wind up being a Roy and no one else's''.

His tight control over drawing, Tyler says, was such that even though a drawing would be nourished or tickled as it went through the often long printing process, its power was evident from the outset. ''Roy's hand was in everything he did,'' Tyler says.

Tyler says that although Lichtenstein was fond of saying that the meaning of his work had little to do with fine-art painting, this wasn't quite true: ''There are a lot of metaphors in his work … but Roy was primarily a subject painter. He worked with what he saw, it wasn't abstract in that way. If you look back at his Ten Dollar Bill, which was drawn way back in the 1950s, and then look at his drawings and etchings later on, you can see … the DNA for the later work. It's all there, it unfolds itself - and that's what we would talk about a lot together.''

Indeed, Tyler says, having worked with Lichtenstein for so long, he misses those discussions.

''We looked forward to those yearly or two-yearly projects,'' he says, describing the artist as shy and guarded, but also as a wonderful diplomat and friend. ''He used to tell me the only thing he really wanted to do was to go in his studio and work - and the next week he'd be in your workshop! He did it in that discipline of his, working all the time, every day, producing an approach to printmaking that was not only intellectual but generous.''

Pop randomly

Pop art icon or con artist?

Damien Hirst exhibit opens at Tate Modern

Well-known contemporary artist Damien Hirst has been ruffling the feathers of art critics since he received public attention back in the 80s. Some have called him a genius and even a modern-day Andy Warhol. Others, like critic Julian Spalding whose book“Con Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can,” remain unimpressed, and even adamant in their disdain for the artist.

They include works from his Natural History series such as “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” which features a suspended shark in formaldehyde and “Mother and Child Divided” which presents a bisected cow and calf also in formaldehyde. Other works include a spin painting, a spot painting, pharmaceuticals, cigarette butts, live butterflies… there’s even a cow’s head being devoured by flies entitled “A Thousand Years.”

New Traveling Show of Lichtenstein Works

The world has changed since the last traveling Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, which opened nearly 20 years ago at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Pop Art has not only continued to capture the imagination of the public, but it has also flourished, helped in part by social networking, global connectivity and a universal fascination with the media.
Curators at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern in London have spent five years organizing their own retrospective, which opens in Chicago on May 16 before going to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in October, the Tate Modern in February 2013 and the Pompidou Center in Paris that July.
Unlike the Guggenheim show, which focused on Lichtenstein’s paintings and sculptures, this exhibition features a significant number of his drawings — nearly 50. James Rondeau, chairman of contemporary art at the Chicago museum, who has put together the show with Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator of the Tate Modern, explained their reasoning: “People don’t understand that many of the images Lichtenstein took from advertisements, comic books, product packaging, you name it, are not exact reproductions. And it is through his drawings that you see the transformative act from original source to the finished painting.”
Lichtenstein, who died in 1997, created images that are now the stuff of legend. He took advertisements for products like dishwashing detergents and foot medications, hot dogs and sneakers; he reinterpreted Monet and Cézanne, Picasso and Brancusi, Chinese landscapes and architectural entablatures. And of course there were his most famous works — those deft yet humorous reinterpretations of comic books.
This show will cover the entire scope of Lichtenstein’s career, from his earliest experimentation with abstraction right through to his late interpretations of the female nude. It will also chronicle the bumps along the way, like his early years, when his work was harshly criticized as vulgar and empty. (The title of a Life magazine article in 1964 asked, “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?”) The exhibition will also chart Lichtenstein’s initial brush with success, after his first show at the Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962, when the art world began to take him seriously. And significant attention will be paid to his 1960s comic book paintings and drawings as well as his art historical images from the 1980s, when he became one of the most revered living painters in the world.
Some things will be new to viewers because they have never been included in a public exhibition. There will be works from the artist’s family and estate and others that had been secreted away in private collections.
One section will be devoted to his examination of the female body — a subject he visited on and off throughout his career. Late in life he took this subject and filtered it through the lens of Matisse and Picasso. “They are reinterpretations of the nude as an art historical genre,” Mr. Rondeau said, “but these late works are also a kind of return to the fundamentals of Pop Art and to his 1960s comic book sources.
“It shows that he was a tried-and-true Pop Artist from beginning to end.”