"The Warhol Look/Glamour Style Fashion"
1999-09-15 until 1999-11-22
Musee del la Mode
Marseille, , FR France

Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola in 1928, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From his childhood in the 1930s, when he collected Hollywood fan magazines and signed publicity photographs of stars, Warhol was obsessed with glamour, style, and fashion. He stayed fashionable throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, a chameleon of changing styles, moving easily in the worlds of commercial illustration and display, nightlife, camp subcultures, high society, and fashion design. These worlds informed Warhols work as a serious and significant artist, and, in turn, his work affected style and fashion. Only now, looking at the whole range of his work, does it become clear that Warhols fascination with glamour, style, and fashion was not a distraction from his real work, nor a debasement of the rarified, pure world of contemporary art, but an integral part of his life and creative process, and a complex and productive response to the tensions between art, popular culture, and daily life.

The work of the other artists, designers, and photographers included in the exhibition has had an important role in the construction and definition of the styles with which Warhol is associated; in large part, they created the Warhol look. This exhibition traces Warhols interests through a series of rooms and displays covering his life and work over four decades, from the 1940s to the 1980s. It makes clear for the first time the seriousness of Warhols approach to the material culture of costume, magazines, photography, and video. At the same time, it brings the worlds of style and fashion into the context of other fields, especially those of contemporary art, film, and museums themselves.

Related Links:

• The Andy Warhol Museum

  Indepth Arts Resources for France

  Other Important Exhibitions in France