Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, and portraits with saturated colors have largely shaped Andy Warhol’s image. The Musée du Luxembourg’s upcoming exhibition deliberately takes a different direction. Beginning September 16, 2026, “Andy Warhol: Line and Image” will bring together nearly 150 drawings, complemented by paintings, silkscreen prints, photographs, and archival documents.
The aim is to show that drawing was never a secondary activity for Warhol. Trained in commercial illustration in the 1940s and 1950s, the artist continued to draw even after he adopted the mechanical reproduction techniques that would make him famous. Some of the drawings on display reveal precisely how his images took shape before becoming instantly recognizable works of art.
An Andy Warhol exhibition unlike the major retrospectives
The exhibition will be organized into five thematic sections, focusing in particular on portraiture, writing, identity, and death. Several rarely seen works will be on display, along with documents from the Factory, the New York studio where Warhol developed much of his work beginning in the 1960s.
The exhibition should therefore appeal equally to those who are already familiar with Warhol and those who associate him primarily with his silkscreen prints. It highlights a contradiction that runs through his entire career: the artist claimed he wanted to work like a machine, but in reality he never abandoned the act of drawing by hand.
Location: Musée du Luxembourg, 19 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris
Dates: September 16, 2026, through January 10, 2027, daily from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., with late-night hours on Mondays until 10 p.m.