How a Warhol print makes art show pop, By Jo Litson - 19th October 2014

Profiles

Art Creative Arts Pop Art Pop Culture Art Gallery of NSW

Wayne Tuniclifee, the curator of the Pop to Popism exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. With Andy Warhol's Marylin.

After nearly two years of sourcing works for the Art Gallery of NSW’s Pop to Popism exhibition, curator Wayne Tunnicliffe had most of what he wanted – but not a suite of Andy Warhol’s vibrantly coloured Marilyn Monroe silkscreen paintings.

“I was at a dinner party and I was lamenting (the fact) to the person I was sitting next to and she said, ‘oh, a friend of mine in Los Angeles has a set,’” says Tunnicliffe.

“Her friend turned out to be Billie Milam Weisman, who is a director of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, who are big collectors and philanthropists, so she put me in touch.”

The Marilyn Monroe suite is one of many iconic works in Pop to Popism, opening next month. Spanning three decades from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, it features 200 works by more than 70 artists.

Among them are Warhol’s Triple Elvis and Campbell’s Soup Cans, Roy Lichtenstein’s first comic-style painting Look Mickey, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist and Brett Whiteley’s 22-metre long The American Dream.

It is the most comprehensive collection of pop art seen in Australia and the first major pop art exhibition to include Australian artists.

Loaners

Tunnicliffe is the AGNSW’s head curator of Australian art. The inspiration for the show came when he was looking at the Australian pop art in the Gallery’s collection.

Securing loans from around the world proved harder than he had anticipated.

“We know doing an Impressionist show it’s going to be incredibly hard because those paintings are highly valuable and fragile to freight and in big demand,” he says.

“I somewhat naively thought that a show about the 1960s, 70s and 80s would be a lot easier. But these are the works people travel to museums to see so it was a lot more complex than I initially thought.

“But we kept up with dogged persistence. What the galleries responded to was the scope and scale and ambition of the show and its Australian context so we ended up getting great things.”

The exhibition will have an interactive family area and a specially designed café with a bright yellow floor and mirrored walls.

“I don’t think you’d be able to do a show like this again for a long time,” says Tunnicliffe. “People are reluctant to lend these works so I don’t think they will travel for a while.”

Pop to Popism, Art Gallery of NSW, November 1 – March 1, 2015

(The Daily Telegraph)