Soup cans and Brillo boxes. That is most of what we know of Andy Warhol’s work. The iconic artist defined pop art in the ’60s with his repurposing of commercial images, but this summer at the Brooklyn Museum, fans will have a chance to see a long-neglected body of work from the man who arguably defined the modern era of art.
In the last decade of his life, from 1978 to 1987, Warhol returned to painting after he famously said he would never paint again in the ’60s, when his focus was on filmmaking and screenprinting. Curator Sharon Matt Atkins says that this later period of his work went largely unnoticed for many reasons.
“In the early 1970s Warhol was really focusing on his film work and commissioned works. He was doing celebrity portraits,” Atkins explains. “A lot of critics dismissed that work as being more of a business venture than anything else and so people kept returning to the pop art. But the reality of it is that this was the period that Warhol was most productive.”
The work still reflects his earlier inspirations of pop art but also expands beyond that. “In this late work, we see Warhol looking back to his earlier work,” explains Atkins. “It’s difficult to separate the influence of this later work because it’s part of a continuum with Warhol’s work.”
