Heather James Fine Art is showcasing a rare Warhol painting in its summer-long exhibition at its gallery in Jackson, Wyoming. The classic silkscreen painting, Sidney Janis, is one of the works in a survey spanning different periods in art history. From Mary Cassatt to Helen Frankenthaler to Warhol, the exhibition spans more than 100 years of styles and movements. 

Sidney Janis is titled for the namesake of the legendary New York gallery that in 1962 mounted The New Realists, the first exhibition of Pop art. Janis was a successful New York businessman who became a collector and a legendary dealer of Modern art from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the later years, he became a champion of the Pop artists, mounting that landmark exhibition. Created in 1967, Warhol’s silk-screen painting of Janis is a 24-by-40-inch assemblage of three rows of five 8-by-8-inch canvases.

Warhol was a commercial illustrator before he found fame. For him, success in business was also art. He was a visionary who famously said that, “In the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” He’s known for his portraits of influential and powerful celebrities, business people, and socialites. He was obsessed with wealth and fame. He wanted it, and was fascinated by those who had it.

As Warhol assembled a motley cast of studio assistants and “Superstar” actors at his Factory studio in New York, Warhol himself became a pop culture icon — and eventually one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Warhol began making silkscreen paintings in 1962, because the process was faster and felt more like an assembly line than the traditional approach. He removed himself as much as he could from the process, leaving “the production” of his ideas to others who could reproduce images many times, with only slight differences.

To create these works, Warhol would select photographs from newspapers and magazines, send them to a printer to be enlarged on silk screens, and then direct Factory assistants to lay the screens over canvases and apply one or two colors with a squeegee. Color was significant in his portraits, and his style became as identifiable as the personalities in the pictures.

Warhol’s commentary on consumer and celebrity culture made him a controversial figure — both celebrated and panned by critics, collectors, curators and, eventually, the general public.

Today, Warhol’s paintings are mostly held by institutions, which continually feature him in solo and group exhibitions, as well as in installations of their permanent collections. The ongoing fascination with his work and legacy contributes to his high market value and reinforces the icon status he had always hoped to gain.

Heather James Fine Art offers a rare look into art history’s past and present, featuring a wide breadth of genres, including cultural art and antiquities, American and Latin American masters, European masters, Impressionist and Modern, postwar and contemporary, and photography. The gallery showcases blue-chip and cutting-edge contemporary art while maintaining the integrity of antiquity and classical masterpieces. For information about the gallery and upcoming exhibitions, visit www.heatherjames.com or call 760-346-8926.