NEW YORK.- The Gallery at The Park Avenue Bank presents Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century through March 2, 2007. This edition of silk-screen prints by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), one of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, is from the permanent collection of The Jewish Museum, the preeminent U.S. institution exploring 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture. The MEET A MUSEUM program offers exhibitions from participating museums in its gallery, located in midtown Manhattan.

Featured in the ten prints are: celebrated French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923); the first Jewish judge of the United States Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941); renowned philosopher and educator Martin Buber (1878-1965); the theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1897-1955), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century; the hugely influential founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939); vaudeville, stage and film comedians, the Marx Brothers: Chico (1887-1961), Groucho (1890-1977), and Harpo (1888-1964); Israelís fourth Prime Minister and one of the founders of the State of Israel, Golda Meir (1898-1978); distinguished American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937); the eminent novelist, Franz Kafka (1883-1924); and avant-garde American writer, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). The collective achievements of this group changed the course of the twentieth century and may be said to have influenced every aspect of human experience.

Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, a series of prints created in 1980 by an innovative artist who became fascinated with a group of influential Jewish figures – a pantheon of great thinkers, politicians, performers, musicians and writers – is a recent gift of Lorraine and Martin Beitler to The Jewish Museumís permanent collection. Works from this series were first shown at The Jewish Museum in 1980 and will be shown again in 2008.

In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol resurrected a genre that had fallen drastically in critical estimation. He then revived that tradition of portraiture through the creation of a new relationship between photography and painting. Obsessed with fame and media hype, he exploited the vast riches of reproducible images that flooded popular culture and made icons of celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Warholís principal obsessions – fame, death, money, and art – are embroiled in a heady mix, and to an extent unprecedented in his work. As a whole, the series is notable for a new language of color, geometric shape and incisive line. These elements infiltrate the photographic context, accentuating, animating, obscuring and dividing particular details. Warholís insistence that the subjects be deceased invests the series with an inescapable feeling of mortality. The faces of the dead appear as behind a tissue of modernity. As individuals they belong in the past, while their image persists in the present. Warholís treatment of these images is noticeably different from his contemporary portraits. The portraits are not glamorized. Instead, the tension sustained between photograph and abstraction focuses the issue of their fame. Warhol presents these individualsí iconic status as the outcome of a complex metamorphosis. The real has been transformed into a glorious, poignant, other-worldly abstraction.

Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century was conceived by art dealer Ronald Feldman. Warhol was immediately enthusiastic as the names of Einstein and Freud were proposed and initially argued that the series should be called The Jewish Geniuses. In this work, Warhol gives the viewer the chance to think about the nature and imagery of fame in an increasingly media saturated world.