Portraits by Andy Warhol

Warhol’s portrait Series features Kimiko Powers, an art collector. Popularized in international art circles in the 1960s, Kimiko and her husband, John, amassed one of the most comprehensive private collection of pop art. This perhaps led to her friendship with famous artists such as Andy Warhol. This was also around the time in the 1970s when Warhol began to regularly accept commissions to paint portraits of the rich and famous because he thought that everyone deserved their “15 minutes.” This portrait captures Kimiko wearing a traditional Japanese dress, glancing at the observer, suggestively Warhol, in an intimate manner. It captures the often unexamined bond between the artist and the collector.

Printmaking, and in particular screenprint, was the basic medium for Andy Warhol’s celebrated work on canvas and paper. While a prize-winning commercial artist in the 1950s, he devised a printing process of blotting outline drawings in ink from one surface to another. In a whimsical book of fashionable shoe styles, done at the time he was head of advertising at a shoe company, his blotted drawings were reproduced and then hand-colored by a team of friends.

About the Artist:

More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspire creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.

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