MOCA Lands Warhol Exhibition

In a marriage of art and commerce--calculated to boost tourism and infuse millions of dollars into the economy--the Museum of Contemporary Art has joined forces with city government to bring a major exhibition of Pop artist Andy Warhol’s work to Los Angeles. In a joint news conference Friday at the museum, Mayor James K. Hahn announced that the city has contributed $250,000 to help MOCA snag the landmark attraction.

“This is a real coup for MOCA, a real coup for Los Angeles,” Hahn said. “It emphasizes that Los Angeles is an art center--always has been and always will be. It’s a place where ingenuity and creativity flourish.”

Los Angeles is the only U.S. venue for the show, which will open at MOCA on May 25 and run through Aug. 18. The 50-year survey--including well-known images and previously unpublished works by the artist, who died in 1987--was organized by the New National Gallery in Berlin, where it will close on Jan. 6. The show wasn’t scheduled to travel, but when the Tate Gallery in London managed to book it for February and March, MOCA’s leaders launched a campaign to extend the tour to Los Angeles.

“What’s interesting about the show, art historically, is that there are previously unpublished works and some bodies of work that haven’t been seen together since they were first exhibited,” said MOCA director Jeremy Strick. But perhaps most important, he said, is that it represents “the viewpoint of the exhibition’s curator Heiner Bastian, who sees Warhol as the essential chronicler of his time. We see Warhol both through the images of popular culture and the disasters he depicted, the electric chairs, the car crashes, the suicides. It’s an exhibition of enormous depth and quality.”

City officials said that, as far as they knew, the city’s partnership with MOCA marks the first time the city has made a significant donation to an art museum in Los Angeles. Calling the contribution “a good investment,” Councilman Nick Pacheco said it proves that “art and the city of Los Angeles can do things that make a win-win situation for all of us.”

Strick said that financial support from the city, MOCA trustees and former trustee Eli Broad were crucial to underwriting the show, but he declined to reveal the full price tag. Sources familiar with similar exhibitions say the cost is in the low millions.

The Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau will market the show in partnership with American Express, offering packages that include lodging at 10 Los Angeles hotels. The strategy will be similar to the bureau’s promotion of “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” a 1999 blockbuster exhibition at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art.

George D. Kirkland, president of the bureau, said that the economic impact of the Warhol exhibition is estimated at $130 million--more than the $122 million generated by the Van Gogh show during its 17-week run at LACMA. Although the Warhol show will run for only 12 weeks, it is still expected to be a big draw.

“The Warhol exhibit has a very contemporary feel to it,” Kirkland said. “We think it will attract an audience that is not only appreciative of the arts, but also a more mid-stream visitor market. I think Warhol will have a far greater emotional connection than Van Gogh did. That may be sacrilegious to say to an informed art community, but in terms of an informed travel community, I think I’m probably more right than wrong.”

Kirkland contends that “the Warhol brand is a stronger franchise than Van Gogh,” but admits he bases that evaluation “more on gut feel than research.” Casting artists in marketing terms may offend the art crowd, but it probably wouldn’t bother Warhol himself.

Born in 1928 to a Czech immigrant family that settled in Pittsburgh, Warhol studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, earning his bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1949. He worked as a graphic designer, illustrator and window display artist in New York while getting a foothold in the world of fine arts.

In the early 1960s, when Pop art supplanted Abstract Expressionism as the leading style of contemporary art, Warhol was at the forefront of the brash new approach.

Finding his inspiration in the spheres of power, politics, glamour and commerce, he pulled images from mass media and advertising. Personalities, including Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley, became fodder for his art, as did Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes, dollar bills, dance-step diagrams and paint-by-number paintings.

Working with bright colors and strong graphic qualities, he produced a huge volume of high-impact work. At the same time, he countered the concept of the artist as a solitary genius who turns out carefully crafted expressions of personal emotion by presenting himself as a businessman and characterizing himself as a machine, engaged in mass production.

The exhibition will focus on “an indispensable, defining figure of contemporary art and one of the great artists of the 20th century,” Strick said.

Warhol also had a special relationship to Los Angeles, he added. The first exhibition of Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings was held at L.A.’s Ferus Gallery in 1962, and the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) organized the first American retrospective in 1970, which later traveled internationally.

Many people may think they know all there is to know about the artist who became as famous as the celebrities he painted. But, Strick said, this is the first major Warhol retrospective in America since the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a huge survey in 1989.

The version of the Warhol retrospective at MOCA will be somewhat smaller than the exhibition in Berlin, which contains 239 works.

Strick said final plans are still underway, but MOCA will present more than 150 works, including a few additions to the Berlin selection.