This is huge for us.
I have never seen any of his works.
The Currier Muesum in Manchester,NH.
The place was shut down well over a year.
With a makeover and addition.
Someone left them many millions of dollars.
When they finished,they had open house.
Mike and I went opening day.
The place was awesome.
Andy Warhol exhibit was the first of series with many to
come.
There will be more.
It is nice.For we had to go to Boston,MA.MFA to see shows.
We will see this when we come home from our holidays.
This is the second week of Mikes vacation.
This is one of the reason to support the arts.




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Heaven knows the Sixties are dead. Andy Warhol and his Marilyn Monroes and gunslinging Elvises, their faces blanched of wrinkles and blemishes, silk-screened onto garish backgrounds and mass-produced, are yesterday's celebs, all long gone. Larger than life then, they're quaint relics now.

So prepare yourself for a jolt when you see Andy Warhol: Pop Politics, the exhibit that opens Saturday at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. From every perspective - art, celebrity, politics, history - this show is a stunner.

The concept is brilliant. What Warhol did for soup cans, Coke bottles and entertainers, he also did for the political figures of his day. He took familiar images of them, or he took dozens of Polaroids of their faces, and turned them into Pop Art. In the new mass media culture, politicians were marketed as products, and that is how Warhol portrayed them.

Pop Politics assembles more than 60 paintings, prints and drawings, many of them in multiples, puts them in context and shows how Warhol made them. Technology has raced ahead in the two decades since his death, but the labeling and branding of candidates remains a huge part of political campaigns. In this respect, the exhibit is timely and topical.

Warhol's palette makes this especially so. Though often gaudy and random, his colors vibrate. His paintings live. While it is impossible to know which John McCain or Barack Obama would have graced a Currier wall had Warhol lived to paint them, you can picture the artist applying his technique to their faces.

Warhol was born 80 years ago in Pittsburgh, the birthplace of bingo, the Ferris wheel and the Big Mac. Trained in art, he earned a reputation in New York City for his ability to draw shoes for fashion ads.

At the time, abstract impressionists dominated the art scene, especially in New York. Their impulses, and their canvases, were often dark or even frightful. As the gray 1950s dissolved into the Technicolor 1960s, Warhol and other Pop artists sought a new direction.

"Pop Art was a reaction to the gloom of abstract expressionism," said Sharon Matt Atkins, associate curator at the Currier and the Warhol exhibit's mastermind. By contrast, "part of what made Warhol's work successful was the way it reflected American culture back at the people who saw it," she said. "It continues to resonate."

The show is the first special exhibition since the expanded Currier reopened last spring. The impetus for it was the museum's acquisition of a Warhol work called "Flash - November 22, 1963."

"Flash" constitutes a rectangle of images of President Kennedy and his assassination. It is

mounted near one of many Warhol multi-portrait depictions of Jackie Kennedy: her smiling face at Love Field, her face extracted from the photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One, her veiled, stricken, dignified face at the funeral.

Befitting the subject, there is a subdued, almost somber feel to these pictures. Many of the images are familiar - JFK's grin, Jackie's pillbox hat, Oswald's doughy face, the sixth-floor window. Yet Warhol's picture of an ad for Oswald's mail-order rifle may cause viewers of a certain age to wince and turn away. Younger viewers, hungry for the assassination's details, may instead move closer in order to read the fine print. Thus do history, memory and art mingle on these canvases.

The Kennedy corner is only the beginning of an exhibit that illustrates a wide range of Warhol's techniques and their origins. For instance, he was so fascinated by the notion of multiple images that he saved hundreds of envelopes with blocks of postage stamps on them. Some of these, appropriately featuring presidents, are on display. So are Polaroids and iconic photographs that Warhol transformed into the portraits that hang near them.

Chasing the money

Politics was not Warhol's principal subject, but it was no great leap from soup cans to Marlon and Marilyn or from Hollywood stars to the Kennedys. As JFK said during his inaugural address, the torch was passed to a new generation. The dollar was king, and products, celebrities and politicians were all market commodities.