Le Grand Monde d’Andy Warhol

The newly remodeled Grand Palais hosts “Le Grand Monde d’Andy Warhol”.

The exhibition consists of almost 150 works, some of them coming out of private collections for the first time, by pop art legend Andy Warhol.

“Warhol wanted to produce portraits that showed not just people, but a society, a whole wide world,” said Alain Cueff, curator of the show.

Painted from the early 1960s onwards, the works represented portraits of famous and not-so-famous people, Elvis, Debby Harry, Brigitte Bardot and Sylvester Stallone, shown together with fashion designers, like Giorgio Armani, artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat.

One of Warhol’s first works, a 1948 painting The Lord Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Nose is on display in Europe for the first time.

“There are strong prejudices about his portrait art,” said Cueff. “It’s no secret that he had more European clients than American ones.”

But, Yves Saint Laurent’s partner Pierre Berge has removed four Andy Warhol portraits of the fashion designer from the Paris exhibition on. Berge had asked for the series of 1974 works to be removed from a section of the show featuring other Warhol portraits of designers under the title “glamour”.

“I don’t think Yves Saint Laurent comes under the category of ‘glamour’”, Berge said.

“I told the curator I did not see things this way, either he changed Saint Laurent’s place or I would withdraw the paintings. Apparently this was not possible for one reason or another and so I withdrew the four works,” Berge added.

Berge said the YSL portraits instead could have been hung in a section titled “artists”.

“I don’t deny he was a designer, that was how he described himself, but I think he was more than that.”