On June 10, 2017, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., opened Spring into Summer with Andy Warhol and Friends! The new exhibition takes an unusual approach to this most famous of Pop artists.

“Although we tend to associate Warhol’s work with artifice and mass production—think of his bold images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans—there is another side to the artist that is often overlooked, his interest in the natural, the real, and the intimate,” says Kenneth E. Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art and Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator of Art. Silver is curating the show with the assistance of Courtney Long, Bruce Museum Zvi Grunberg Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17.

The exhibition builds on three important works in the Bruce Museum collection. Warhol’s Little Red Book, 1971, a gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, features ten unique polaroid portraits of the artist’s friends -- New Canaan architect Philip Johnson and his partner David Whitney, fashion model Donna Jordan, art critic Barbara Rose, and a self-portrait. Flowers (Hand-Colored), 1974, a suite of ten silkscreens prints given to the Bruce by Peter Brant, depict floral still-lives. Two large silkscreen portrait prints, Sachiko, 1977, are gifts of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.

Beyond these Bruce Museum treasures, significant loans will allow Spring into Summer with Andy Warhol and Friends! to offer an expanded view of Warhol’s aesthetic universe, including an important four-part painted portrait, never before exhibited in public, of Sachiko Goodman, along with the scores of polaroid studies that the artist made in preparation for the commission; and a fine pencil portrait by Warhol of Philip Johnson. Beyond the human subjects, Warhol’s silkscreen series of 1983, Endangered Species, offers ten “animal portraits” including a San Francisco Silverspot butterfly and an American Bald Eagle. Fortuitously, the great American realist painter Philip Pearlstein, Warhol’s undergraduate roommate, has kindly agreed to lend his surprisingly abstract rendition of an American Eagle (1949) to the exhibition as well.

Finally, following the lead of Warhol’s ground-breaking exhibition of 1970, Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol, in which the artist retrieved and put on display long-forgotten objects from the storerooms of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Bruce’s own storerooms have been plundered for specimens from its historic natural science collection—butterflies, birds, and a few other creatures.