AIC's 41st Annual Meeting

Andy Warhol, an important figure in the pop art movement, was at the leading edge of the newest and most forward directed artistic expression of his time. Recent scientific examinations of several of Warhol’s paintings from the 1960s, including A Boy for Meg (1962), demonstrate that his materials were not necessarily as modern as the style and substance of his works. Although Warhol’s work throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s pushed increasingly towards removing the artist’s hand from the work and frequently employed silk-screen techniques to achieve this, in the pivotal year of 1962 he obviously preferred brush painting using traditional media for his first large scale paintings on canvas. Binding medium analysis using gas chromatography – mass spectrometry has shown that the presence of egg proteins mixed with drying oils as the primary painting medium and not the casein that has been commonly associated with these important transitional paintings. Commercial egg tempera paints were readily available in tubes, and he would have been conversant with these matte, fast drying paints from his decade long career as a commercial illustrator. By the following year, he does move to screen printing with acrylic paints and inks. This talk will cover technical and scientific analyses of paintings from the National Gallery of Art, the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Warhol Foundation, Pittsburgh, and will discuss the extent and implications of these findings in better understanding Warhol’s early methods and materials.