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In tones of dark sepia and coffee brown against a silvery-white background, a rectangular image taken from a photograph is repeated to make a grid with five across and eight rows in this square silkscreen painting. The repeated images are indistinct and grainy, though some are clearer than others. The image shows three men, four women, and a baby gathered in front of what could be a farmhouse. Shown from the knees up, the people appear to have light skin and most of them smile. The women wear dresses and one man, to our right, wears a brimmed hat. The sky above them is marked with fine, parallel, curving lines, reminiscent of fingerprint whorls.

Andy Warhol

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Rauschenberg Family), 1962

East Building, Upper Level — Gallery 407-D

Medium

silkscreen on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 208.2 x 208.2 cm (81 15/16 x 81 15/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Howard Adams and Patrons' Permanent Fund

Accession Number

1982.96.1

Artists / Makers

Andy Warhol (artist) American, 1928 - 1987

Image Use

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Provenance

(Eleanor Ward, New York); purchased 1963 by Mr. and Mrs. William Howard Adams, New York;[1] gift 1982 to NGA.

[1] Purchase Information was supplied by Mr. Adams in a letter to Earl A. Powell III, 28 March 2000; copy in NGA curatorial files. The painting first hung in the Adams' house in Jackson County, Missouri, and later in their residences in Princeton and Washington, D.C.

Associated Names

Adams, William Howard, Mr. and Mrs.

Exhibition History

1968: Andy Warhol, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1968, unnumbered catalogue (probably not shown in subsequent venues in Amsterdam, Kassel, Bern, and Oslo).

2008: Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol's Work, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; M.H. de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 2008-2009, not in catalogue (shown only in Pittsburgh).

2011: Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol's Work [continuation of 2008 exhibition], Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, 2011, not in catalogue.

2017: Robert Rauschenberg, Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2016-2018, no. 4 (shown only in New York).

Bibliography

1989: Strick, Jeremy. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture: Selections for the Tenth Anniversary of the East Building. Washington, D.C., 1989: 98, repro. 99.

1992: American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 373, repro.