In tribute to pop master

Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA, says the preparations for this exhibition started about two years ago when Picasso－Birth of a Genius was underway at the Beijing venue, and he flew to Pittsburgh to discuss with The Andy Warhol Museum about the possibility of mounting an exhibition.

He says their anticipation initially was not to mount the first Andy Warhol exhibition in China but to present "the best of its kind".

Visitors are able to gain new information about the artist, thanks to intensive research conducted over the years by The Andy Warhol Museum, which introduces itself on its website as "a global destination for scholarship and learning about Warhol's life, art, and relevance to contemporary culture".

In a video speech at the opening, Jose Carlos Diaz, chief curator at The Andy Warhol Museum, described the UCCA exhibition as "a labor of love" for the curatorial team in Pittsburgh.

"It begins with Warhol's origins, childhood and early youth in Pittsburgh. It shows his college work before moving onto his early career in 1950s New York City."

In Warhol's self-portraits, one can see how the artist kept reinventing the physical image of himself. The exhibition offers a rare view of a teenage Warhol. A gouache self-portrait from 1944 is displayed at the entrance of the show along with a photo of the graduation journal of Schenley High School where Warhol studied, with a comment, "As genuine as a fingerprint."

Warhol enrolled into the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1945. At first, he struggled with the courses, but gradually his innovative style and ideas won recognition among teachers and students.

The exhibition, while introducing Warhol's artistic pursuit in childhood and later in college, also shows the role his mother, Julia Warhola, played. She encouraged him to draw, and she bought him a camera and a film projector, supporting his interest in photography and filmmaking.

Julia Warhola went to live with her son at his New York home in 1952. A self-taught artist, she painted her two favorite subjects, cats and angels, and collaborated with her son on illustrations. Photos of mother and son taken in 1958 are on show in Beijing in juxtaposition with a painting, Cat with "Purr" Inscriptions, which Julia Warhola made between 1957 and 1961, and a drawing jointly by her and her son from 1956.

Andy Warhol's successful career as an award-winning commercial illustrator in New York during the 1950s is seen through many exhibits.

His signature paintings of some iconic brand advertisements such as those for Coca-Cola in 1961 and Campbell's Soup in 1969 are also on display.

"In it (Coca-Cola, 1961) we see Warhol still painting by hand－h(huán)e hadn't yet really embraced the silk-screen as he would later on," Moore says. "Warhol still felt himself to be a serious painter. He needed to be able to show us his hand. He needed to give a nod back to abstract expressionism when artists were throwing paint around and there was a lot of vitality."