Andy Warhol Museum

Pop museum / Visit during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh (24 and 25 September 2009)

The largest Andy Warhol collection – almost one thousand works (paintings, films, the famous helium-filled “clouds”) – is in Pittsburgh, where the “pope” of pop art was born, in 1928. But not where he died, in 1987 – that was in New York, the city he moved to at the age of 21 to exercise his talents as publicist and found the legendary Factory. Two years after his death, the city of Pittsburgh, then in the throes of reconstruction, opened a museum dedicated to the home-grown artist in an old warehouse. From temporary exhibitions to permanent collections, the Andy Warhol Museum gives visitors the opportunity to renew their acquaintance with his Campbell’s Soup and the portraits of Liz Taylor, while also discovering contemporary artists (Shepard Fairey, author of the famous Obama HOPE, 2008). For the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, the museum put on Drawn to the Summit, an exhibition of the works of 40 cartoonists in counterpoint to the summit, and, alongside it, a tribute exhibition, Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work. We all know how much Andy Warhol was involved in the music scene, from creation of the Velvet Underground band to the cover art for the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album. After the visit organised for the First Ladies alongside the G20, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy stayed on for a guided tour with the curator: obvious affinities for the most musical of the First Ladies.