Behind Warhol's paintings

You know the Warhol portraits - big, colorful, star-struck paintings. But what you haven't seen are the photographs the artist took of his subjects in the first place. A new exhibit opening at the Nasher Museum at Duke University includes about 250 Polaroids and 75 black-and-white prints he took between 1970 and 1987.

Using a Polaroid Big Shot camera, Warhol captured the poses of such celebrities as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Truman Capote, Dorothy Hamill, Bianca Jagger, Grace Jones and Jack Nicklaus. Many will be displayed for the first time.

The origin of the exhibition was the donation of hundreds of Warhol photographs to the Nasher, the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro by the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York. The show travels to the Weatherspoon next summer and comes to Chapel Hill about a year from now.

There will also be a film series, a free family day, and a talk by art critic and social theorist Dave Hickey. Duke Performances will present "13 Most Beautiful Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests," a musical accompaniment to Warhol's silent film portraits.

"Warhol's Polaroids reveal an important dimension of the artist's process in creating his famous large-scale portraits," curator Trevor Schoonmaker said in a statement the museum released. "Although the Polaroids were aids for painting portraits, in and of themselves they are significant and represent a relatively unknown body of Warhol's work."

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