The Line and the Image. Our photos of the exhibition, before anyone else:

His first self-portrait dates from 1942. He was fourteen years old. His last drawing, done in acrylic for The Last Supper, dates from 1986. He was fifty-eight years old and would die the following year. In between, Andy Warhol never stopped drawing. It is this foundational line, often overshadowed by the Marilyn Monroe silkscreens and Campbell's boxes, that the Musée du Luxembourg is exhibiting through one hundred and fifty drawings, complemented by paintings, photographs, and archival material.

Andrew Warhola became Andy Warhol through drawing. Trained in illustration at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he moved to New York at the age of twenty-one and initially worked for women's magazines, Bonwit Teller and Tiffany. Under the influence of Klee, Picasso, Cocteau, and Ben Shahn, he developed his own visual language. Drawing remained his primary tool until the late 1950s. When painting, screen printing, and film took over, he returned to it as if it were a laboratory. The portrait of Mao is a testament to this: it allowed him to test ideas that were then transposed onto canvas.

The exhibition unfolds in five sections: his early advertising work, handwriting, faces and masks, his long-confidential gay iconography, and his obsession with death. This obsession is rooted in a specific event: on June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, shot him in his studio, the Factory. He survived, but the wound haunted him.

1

LUXEMBOURG MUSEUM
From September 16, 2026 to January 10, 2021 2027
19 rue de Vaugirard, 75006
Metro: Saint-Sulpice (Line 4) - Open daily 10:30 am - 7 pm,
Monday until 10 pm - Price: €14 - Reduced price: €10
Free for under 16s
[/compact]