Floor 4: Warhol West (exiting Twombly)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Andy Warhol Gallery. You are surrounded by some large silkscreen portraits of celebrity figures and faces, including Warhol himself.
You've entered from the back right corner of this long rectangular gallery, facing the short, far front wall. The gallery is partially split into two equal-size galleries by a wall extending into the middle of the gallery from the left wall. The first gallery has pale lavender walls, five silkscreen prints, and an artist panel with a video about Warhol. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel. The second part of the gallery, straight ahead, has white walls and five silkscreen prints. Two of the prints are Andy Warhol self-portraits displayed perpendicular to each other. One is on the front wall, and the other is toward the end of the right wall. Although they depict the same image, each uses a different visual treatment, and their close placement highlights these contrasts.
On the left wall of the second gallery, near the front corner, is an entrance to the 4th Floor City Gallery, which spans the length of the entire 4th floor.
The exit to the Gerhard Richter Gallery is in the front left corner of the second gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
—Andy Warhol, 1966
Andy Warhol
Born 1928, Pittsburgh; died 1987, New York
Andy Warhol began his professional life as a successful advertising illustrator. After shifting to fine art in the early 1960s, he made the radical decision to adapt materials and strategies from the commercial realm: In 1962, screenprinting became his primary medium. This technique, which uses photographs to make printing plates, allowed Warhol—together with assistants in his studio, which he called The Factory—to readily appropriate images from the mass media. With their repetitive imagery and mechanical surfaces, Warhol's works are often perceived as cool and detached. Seen together, however, his depictions of celebrities, criminals, and national and everyday tragedies invite us to reflect on culture, consumption, death, and identity.
Related Media
Transcript
[This is a silent process video]
Objects
5 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1961
Casein on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000
This is one of four paintings Warhol based on a small ad for a plastic surgeon that appeared in the National Enquirer in 1961. For this and other early paintings, such as the nearby Telephone [1], he used a projector to transfer his subject to canvas. He experimented with a range of painting techniques, from relatively loose to the more precise, impersonal style that became his trademark. Warhol himself had undergone an unsatisfying plastic surgery on his nose in the late 1950s, and many of his works explore themes of physical appearance, including the ideal beauty promoted by Hollywood and Madison Avenue.
Visual Description
A large horizontal painting—shorter than the average adult, but about as wide as their outstretched arms—presents two large, closely cropped profiles of faces rendered in high-contrast black and white, placed side by side like a mirrored pair, that reveal differences in facial features and nose shapes.
The face on our left contains a white facial profile emerging from a solid black field at the far left, with only key features—arched eyebrow, heavy-lidded eye, hooked nose, and full lips—described by thick, flat black shapes. Near the upper edge, loose, blot-like marks suggest hair, while a small teardrop-shaped dot sits below the eye area. A vertical, irregular-edged black rectangle divides the composition at center, creating a sharp separation between the two faces in profile.
On our right, a second white profile of a face repeats the same stylized features, but with some noticeable differences: the nose is smaller and flatter, there is no teardrop-shaped dot under the eye, the line under the eye is smaller, and the eyebrow is one continuous line. This face is also set against a tall black block with additional small, organic black marks near the top implying hair.
The edges of the black areas appear slightly rough and brushy, emphasizing the graphic, poster-like simplicity of the forms. The dark borders of the rectangles that surround the profiled faces are slightly offset within the frame of the image, referencing the printed source that informs the painting. The piece is set within two wood frames: the inner frame is a light brown wood, and the outer frame is thick white wood.
Artwork Label Text
1961
Crayon and synthetic polymer paint on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993
Visual Description
A piece in crayon and synthetic polymer paint—about as high as a tall adult, and slightly narrower than their outstretched arms—presents an oversized depiction of an early 20th century candlestick telephone, rendered mostly in black on a gray-white field.
The telephone fills the left and center areas. A thick, rounded base sits near the bottom edge, painted with broad, brushy black areas and a few white highlights. Rising from the base is a vertical stick of the telephone, also black, with streaks and thin gaps where the lighter ground shows through. Near the top, a circular mouthpiece flares outward. Above it, an earpiece is angled diagonally, its interior indicated by curved lines and a few small dark shapes.
To the left of the vertical stick of the phone hangs a separate receiver, attached by a short horizontal arm. It is comprised of rounded forms with a loop-like detail at the top and a thick, bell-shaped lower end, all painted in the same glossy black with sparse highlights. To our right, in the right third of the canvas, there is a vertical band of loose, scribbled crayon marks—mostly pale blue and gray with a touch of beige—forming a textured vertical shape that fades into the background.
The composition also contains visible brushstrokes, smudges, and small drips. The piece is set within two wood frames: the inner frame is a light brown wood, and the outer frame is thick white wood.
Artwork Label Text
1963
Silver paint and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
This work reproduces photographs from a 1963 Newsweek article about suburban housewives poisoned by tainted cans of tuna. It belongs to Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, which addresses topics including suicide, car crashes, and the electric chair. Far from trivializing its subject matter, this work conveys the tragic frequency of such events, illuminating the dark corners of American postwar culture. Considered alongside Warhol's iconic images of celebrities, many of which were produced the same year, this work also highlights the wide range of subjects in contemporary media coverage.
Visual Description
A horizontally oriented artwork in reflective silver paint and black silkscreen ink on linen presents a collage-like image of a tuna fish can, text, and two portraits of women—and a slightly-modified and misaligned duplicate of that collage-like image—side-by-side. The artwork is about a foot shorter than the average adult, but as wide as their outstretched arms.
Near the upper center, a tuna can fills the composition; the can is seen from slightly above with its circular lid catching light, and the label at the bottom reads "tuna" in bold, capital letters with a small circular "A&P" mark. Across the can's rim, text markings appear, including "W 3Y2" and "118 X," Beneath the can, the text reads: "Seized shipment: Did a leak kill . . ." with small "UPI" printed above the text in superscript.
Along the lower section, two small, rectangular, halftone portrait photos of women appear in a row; the images show two different women with light skin tone. The woman on the left is smiling and has short, dark, softly curled hair and a light blouse; the woman on the right is also smiling but has lighter hair and wears glasses.
These elements—the tuna can, the text, and the two portraits of the women—are duplicated in an image to the right, but with slight variations and subtle misalignments. The surrounding field is a hazy silver-gray with scattered smudges, streaks, and distressed patches. The piece is in a gray metal frame.
Artwork Label Text
1963
Silver paint, spray paint, and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
Warhol borrowed this image of Elvis Presley from a publicity photo for the 1960 Western Flaming Star, laying it over a silver, spray-painted background that references the silver screen. As in the press photo that served as its source, the painting removes Elvis from any recognizable context, allowing the actor’s costume, stance, and gun to identify the genre to which the image belongs. By repeating the same figure at varying intervals and densities, Warhol gives the composition a cinematic feel and specifically evokes the repetitive themes of the Western film genre.
Visual Description
Spanning nearly seven feet tall by ten feet wide—about the size of a single-car garage door—this linen work in silver paint, spray paint, and silkscreen ink presents three nearly identical, life-size black-and-silver figures of Elvis Presley repeated across a metallic gray field.
Each Elvis featured here—a young man with light skin and dark hair—stands full-length in a wide, braced stance, facing forward, with his right arm extended toward the viewer, aiming a pistol. His left arm is bent at the elbow, his hand open and his fingers slightly spread out. He wears a light, open-collared button-down shirt with long sleeves, gray jeans, and black boots; a thick belt with a rectangular buckle sits at his waist, and a holster hangs at his right hip. The three figures are aligned left, center, and right, although they are not spaced from each at even intervals; the figure on our right is closer to the center figure than the figure on our left. The figure in the center and on our right also overlap at the lower leg, ankle, and foot. There are slight variations in cropping and ink density—darker blacks and sharper detail on the figure on your left, with more faded tones on the center and right—creating a repetitive effect.
The silver ground is mottled with creases, scuffs, and spray-like tonal shifts. The piece is in a gray metal frame.
Artwork Label Text
1964
Silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Warhol was one of ten artists commissioned to create artwork for the exterior of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. His contribution was a twenty-foot-square mural based_ _on police mug shots, which he called 13 Most Wanted Men. The ambiguity of the title was intended, linking homoeroticism with criminality at a time when queer culture was considered illicit. The mural upset officials, who painted over it before the fair opened. The images survive in works such as this, which Warhol made using the same silkscreens he used for the mural.
Visual Description
A diptych silkscreen on linen presents two vertically oriented, black-and-white portraits of a young white man with light skin that resemble mug shots—each about the size of a large wall poster—arranged side by side.
The left portrait shows a frontal head-and-shoulders view of this man. He has short, dark, wavy hair with a small curl falling onto his forehead. His expression is neutral, with closed lips and slightly heavy-lidded eyes gazing at you. He wears a light-colored collared shirt, and at the bottom edge he holds a rectangular identification placard with blocky lettering and numbers; parts of the text are obscured and grainy, but the top line reads "nyc police" in all capital letters. Beneath that text, there are two rows of numbers that are grainy and mostly illegible; however, a number three is visible, as well as a number six.
The right portrait shows the same man in right-facing profile, emphasizing his nose, lips, ear, and jawline; his dark hair is combed back and slightly tousled. He wears the same light, collared shirt. Both panels use coarse dot patterns and high contrast with speckled ink and rough edges. The pieces are individually framed in gray metal frames.