Andy Warhol: Prints

from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Exhibition Website

Jun 3 2017 - Sep 10 2017

The High Museum of Art is the exclusive East Coast venue for a sweeping retrospective featuring more than 250 prints and ephemera by artist Andy Warhol (American, 1928­­–1987). This comprehensive show is the largest exhibition of its kind and includes such iconic screenprint portfolios as Marilyn Monroe (1967), Campbell’s Soup I (1968), Electric Chair (1971), and Mao (1972).

Printmaking featured prominently throughout Warhol’s career, beginning with his earliest work as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s. He discovered the process of silkscreen printing in 1962 and produced his first portfolio of screenprints, Marilyn, in 1967 at his legendary Factory studio. Subsequently, silkscreen printing became synonymous with Warhol’s art from the Factory Years through the end of his life.

The works in the exhibition are drawn exclusively from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation in Portland, Oregon. Remarkable for their nearly exhaustive range, the Schnitzer Collections offer an unparalleled opportunity to explore the breadth of Warhol’s influential graphic production over the course of four decades. The artist’s fascination with the commodification of celebrity chronicles American popular culture of the second half of the twentieth century and serves as a prelude for considering our current fame-obsessed, media-saturated culture.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether or not you go, Andy Warhol: Prints: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation was published to accompany this major exhibition―the largest of its kind ever to be presented. It includes approximately 250 of Warhol’s prints and ephemera, including iconic silkscreen prints of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. In their fascination with popular culture and provocative subverting of the difference between original and copy, Warhol’s prints are recognized now as a prescient forerunner of today’s hyper-sophisticated, hyper-saturated and hyper-accelerated visual culture. Organized chronologically and by series, the publication establishes the range of Warhol’s innovative graphic production as it evolved over the course of four decades, with a particular focus on Warhol’s use of different printmaking techniques, beginning with illustrated books and ending with screen printing. "I’m for mechanical art,” said Warhol. “When I took up silkscreening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through commercial techniques of multiple reproduction.”

Andy Warhol: Prints: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation

  • Works on Paper
  • American
  • 20th Century
  • Andy Warhol

Exhibition Venues & Dates