Andy Warhol - La ligne et l’image

While the name Andy Warhol immediately evokes silkscreen prints and celebrity portraits, his drawn work occupies a central place in his artistic practice. The exhibition "Andy Warhol. The Line and the Image" reveals how much this medium, far from being ancillary, accompanied his entire career.

Trained in illustration, the artist never ceased drawing, including after the adoption of mechanical processes that marked his work. Drawing thus appears as a constant space of experimentation, where images are built and a singular visual thinking unfolds. From a first Self-Portrait dated 1942 to the acrylic drawings for The Last Supper in 1986, Warhol’s drawn production is abundant and varied. Portraits, caricatures, genre scenes, advertising illustrations, self-promotional portfolios: drawing remained his tool of choice until the late 1950s. It allowed him to progressively emancipate himself from the influences of Klee, Picasso, Cocteau, as well as from American artists like Shahn. Through drawing, Andrew Warhola becomes Andy Warhol.

After a period dominated by painting and then cinema between 1963 and 1973, he returned to drawing with new aims linked to his pictorial production, notably in commissioned portraits, of which the Mao portrait is a major example. Drawing thus becomes an experimental space: it enables exploring chromatic, graphic and conceptual choices, often at a scale close to that of his paintings.

The exhibition's itinerary unfolds around five thematic sections: beginnings as an advertising illustrator, the importance of handwritten text, fascination with faces and masks, gay iconography long kept confidential, and reflections on death, which became an obsession after the 1968 assassination attempt that nearly cost him his life.

The exhibition brings together about 150 drawings, as well as paintings, paper silkscreen prints, photographs and archival documents. It highlights the artist's technical inventiveness and the processes he developed (stamps, transferred lines, stencils, collages), designed for the reproduction and repetition of images. Drawings and documents, rare or neglected, provide access to the making of the work and offer a window into the artist's New York studio, The Factory. All these avenues invite a reconsideration of Warhol's entire oeuvre through this dialogue between gesture and reproduction, between hand and machine.

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Exhibition produced by Grand Palais RMN

CURATION

Alain Cueff - Art historian

Scenography: Véronique Dollfus

Cover: Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1978, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 101.6 x 101.6 cm, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. © 2026 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris 2026. Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1978, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 101.6 x 101.6 cm, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. © 2026 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris 2026