In the 1980s, Andy Warhol expanded his artistic attentions beyond the celebrities and lifestyles of contemporary culture and embraced art history as a source of thematic inspiration. Referencing famous works from Old Master painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, Warhol provided new perspectives on the classics by printing them in his iconic Pop Art style. In 1982, Warhol produced this colorful print, ‘Goethe’, with an appropriated image of German writer Johann von Goethe as a traveler from Johann Tischbein’s 1787 painting, ‘Goethe in the Campagna’. Reframing Tischbein’s reclining figure composition as a tight portrait of Goethe, Warhol changes the context while maintaining the original image. Here, Warhol treats the prominent writer and theorist in a similar manner as Marilyn Monroe and Mao, showing the vulnerability of an image’s meaning to the affects of mass production and manipulation.

Andy Warhol (1927-1987) is the most widely recognized artist of the 1960s Pop Art movement, a genre that would change the American art market indefinitely. Warhol received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, and subsequently moved to New York City to pursue a career in the arts. It was not long before he was creating ground-breaking works, including paintings, prints, photographs, and films, that brought attention to American pop culture and the lifestyle of Hollywood celebrities. Warhol embraced market culture and helped to lead a change in the New York art scene that would in turn influence others to also look to consumer culture and goods for artistic inspiration. Today, he is regarded as one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century, contributing not only thousands of works of art that are housed in museums and collections worldwide but also an iconic style that would impact the art market and artists alike for decades. His works have been exhibited in over two thousand exhibitions, including retrospectives at The Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY (2008); Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris, France (1990); and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (1989).

Selected Public Collections:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY)
The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY)
The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY)
The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL)