Late 1977/Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
25.4 x 25.4 cm (each), total 101.6 x 101.6 cm
Permanent Exhibition: From the Renaissance to the 20th Century – 500 Years of Western Paintings
Exhibition period:Saturday April 12~Sunday June 22, 2025
Permanent Exhibition Gallery 6 in the New Wingof Tokyo Fuji Art Museum
Permanent Exhibition: From the Renaissance to the 20th Century – 500 Years of Western Paintings
Exhibition period: Saturday July 12~Monday September 15, 2025
Permanent Exhibition Gallery 6 in the New Wing of Tokyo Fuji Art Museum
SUMMARY
Today known as the most famous artist in the field of pop art, the American painter Andy Warhol was a commercial designer engaged in advertising business in the 1950s. It was in the early 1960s that he first achieved name recognition as a pop art artist. Taking popular commercial art images, such as gravure pictures of popular movie stars, comic books, and advertisements promoting mass consumption as a subject for his work, he turned them into art works while retaining their kitsch nature. To achieve this, a technique that Warhol was fond of using was a method of “repetition.” He said, “I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again.” The subject matters used for this repetition were mostly things collected from the media (such as TV, movies, newspapers, or magazines) surrounding daily life in contemporary society, including merchandise such as Campbell’s Soup can and Coca-Cola bottle, celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, or footage of the moment of an accident. Warhol was keenly interested in an aspect that a mechanical repetition takes away the power of reality, creates a completely different meaning and brings about another effect. His preference toward such an image led to the photography and silk-screen printing technique that are capable of producing multiple images at once, and consequently he came up with his own unique method of “pictorialization” using the images obtained with the printing technique. The work Athletes employs the face of a famous American pro golfer as a repetitive imagery. Warhol once said, “I think of myself as an American artist: I like it here, I think it’s so great.” Perhaps one may say that Warhol represented his own inner America in this work by venerating a legend of sporting world as an icon of the 20th century.
ARTIST
Andy Warhol
1928-1987
List of artworks by the same artist
INFORMATION

Saturday, January 12 - Saturday, May 4, 2019
500 Years of Western Paintings: Collection of Tokyo Fuji Art Museum Shanghai PowerLong Museum (Shanghai, China)
Tuesday, October 23 - Sunday, December 23, 2018
500 Years of Western Paintings: Collection of Tokyo Fuji Art Museum Tsinghua University Art Museum (Beijing, China)
Saturday, October 24 - Sunday, December 20, 2009
The Intersection of Paintings and Photographs Nagoya City Art Museum (Aichi, Japan)
Sunday, October 1 - Sunday, December 3, 2000
Masterpieces of Western Paintings from the Renaissance to the 20th Century National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Taipei, Taiwan)
EXPLORE

You can search and browse content on a platform across museums and archival institutions nationwide, and create My Gallery (online exhibition).

The Official Navigator of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum is voice-over artist, actress and vocalist Yoko Honna. She narrates the Japanese-language presentation and audio guidance segments of the works of Western paintings on display at our New Wing Permanent Gallery.