MONTREAL - From Studio 54 to Shirley Temple and the Velvet Underground, a new exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts explores the role of music and dance in Andy Warhol's art.
Stephane Aquin, curator of contemporary art at the museum, said Tuesday no show has yet explored the musical dimension to the pop artist's work.
"Warhol, the painter, sculptor, illustrator, television producer, filmmaker, photographer, the list goes on," he said at a media preview of the exhibit, which will run from this Thursday until Jan. 18.
"But never musician."
Musical stars like Judy Garland and Alice Faye formed Warhol's early fascination with music, one that spanned his four-decade long career.
Warhol, a subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera for years, found inspiration in all the forms of music surrounding him, and his tastes ranged from low-brow pop hits to high-brow classical compositions.
Visitors to the Factory -- Warhol's New York City studio and hangout for artists and musicians -- have described the artist listening to Bach and rock from two competing stereos as he worked.
"Warhol loved every form of music and dance, whether it was classical forms, avant-garde forms or popular forms," said Matt Wrbican, archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
"He was just all around it all the time."
Photographer Nat Finkelstein took one of the Warhol portraits in the show, a large-scale image of the artist holding up a tambourine to his face.
"He fed off the youth who were around him and their taste in music was infused into Andy," Finkelstein said.
"The Who was a favourite group, the Stones were there, the Byrds were there. He was very pop art-ish in his taste in music, but he did recognize the Velvet Underground and who they were, of course."
Warhol's collaboration with one of the seminal bands of the 1960s led to one of the first major multimedia shows of the 20th century, presented in 1966 to the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry.
Inspired by German composer Richard Wagner's theory of art incorporating sound, vision and body in motion, the show consisted of music by the Velvets, the dancing of Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga, and filmmaking by Barbara Rubin and Jonas Mekas who interrogated the assembled psychiatrists about their sex lives.
Warhol's work with the Velvet Underground also produced the classic peelable banana album cover.
In 1949, Warhol illustrated his first record cover, A Program of Mexican Music, and continued designing albums until his death in 1987.
Collector Paul Marechal spent 12 years tracking down the 50 album covers Warhol illustrated and that are featured in the multimedia exhibition.
The covers show the transformation of the marketing and sale of music through image, ranging from the personification of the artist to the conceptualization of the band, like the zippered cover for the Stones' Sticky Fingers album.
Marechal said even Warhol experts had no idea of the extent of the work the artist did on record covers.
"Andy Warhol, more then any other artist, understood the importance of drawing music," he said.
His work designing album covers also highlights paradoxes in his art.
"He turned daily life objects like Campbell's soup cans into artwork but with the record covers he did the opposite," Marechal said.
"He made one of his own artworks (album covers) into one of the most common household items in North America. He was a far more complex artist then some people want to acknowledge."
The exhibit is a collaboration among the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Andy Warhol Museum.
It features 650 works from Warhol and other artists and incorporates more than 100 music samples including the only known recorded session from 1963 of The Druds, Warhol's own short-lived band.
