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Portrait of Jamie Wyeth with Tan Background
Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
Acrylic and screenprint on canvas, 1976

Enlarged image

Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art, Nashville, TN
© 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photograph by Shannon Clark


Portrait of Jamie Wyeth with Tan Background
Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
Acrylic and screenprint on canvas, 1976

“The Patriarch of Pop paints the Prince of Realism,” the New York Times announced, covering the Coe Kerr Gallery’s crowd-pleasing 1976 exhibition of thirty-six Andy Warhol–Jamie Wyeth portraits. During their mutual portrait session, Warhol had shot 150 Polaroid photographs and produced six silkscreen paintings and five large-scale drawings of the handsome young man in a dreamy, contemplative pose. Warhol found Wyeth (born 1946) challenging; his new friend was perhaps a difficult subject for his usual depersonalized depiction of fame.

The impact of Warhol’s Pop icons of glamor and celebrity—with their ironic commercialization, fluorescent colors, and flattening merger of photography, printing, and painting—was heightened by the contrast with Wyeth’s enthralling, excruciating realism. The Warhol-Wyeth pairing and subsequent exhibition signaled a new validity for portraiture after years of existence under the critical radar. “Not since Gainsborough painted ‘The Blue Boy,’” exulted Coe Kerr’s owner, “has portraiture caused such a stir.”



Enlarged image

Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art, Nashville, TN
© 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photograph by Shannon Clark