Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn (Virtual)

Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn explores Andy Warhol’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, and the tabloid world they embodied. His epochal paintings of the actresses in the 1960s coincided with the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood and an upsurge in consumer culture. Jewish consciousness and openly Jewish celebrity were also on the rise. The fact that Hollywood’s blonde bombshell and violet-eyed siren were both converted Jews was significant: it signaled a growing popular acceptance of Jewish public figures. Warhol’s portraits, both photographically familiar and disturbingly abstracted, explore the complex, manufactured nature of identity.  His images cemented their status as the most glamorous women of their era, the twentieth century’s great myth and legend.

Sylvia Laudien-Meo is an art historian and has been involved in the art community of NYC for over 25 years, working at MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum and the Jewish Museum as gallery educator, conducting art and architecture-focused tours throughout the city as well as teaching at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She came to New York from her native Germany the year the Wall came down with a DAAD scholarship for Columbia Univ. and fell in love with the city, its creative energy, and art collections ...so she stayed in the US and remains most passionate about the arts and sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm!