Beuys by Warhol, the work that became part of the museum's collection, was created by the American artist in 1980, and is part of a series of portraits of the great German artist that Warhol conceived on the occasion of the meeting between the two artists , which took place in Naples on the initiative of the gallery owner Lucio Amelio. A figure of fundamental importance for international contemporary art, in 1965 Lucio Amelio opened his Modern Art Agency in Naples, exhibiting the works of the most innovative artists of those years, including Beuys and Warhol, becoming a place for debate and research , as a meeting point between internationally renowned artists who are also very different from each other. The political, philosophical, symbolic and radical nature of Beuys's work constituted, in those years, one of the most important experiences of conceptual art of a social matrix, but it was profoundly distant from Warhol's investigation into the society of mass consumption and on the media cult of celebrity. The diversity of these two visions made even more striking, in the eyes of the art world of those years, the encounter made possible by the charismatic personality of Amelio, of which the Beuys by Warhol cycle is perhaps the most extreme outcome. The series of portraits that Warhol dedicates to Beuys is centered on a photograph that, if well captures the psychological intensity and acumen of the German artist's thought (with the result of producing a portrait very distant from the usual images of celebrities which he is linked to the name of Warhol), is furthermore subjected to the silkscreen flattening and the chromatic variation in several versions usual for the artist. A work that is both personal and serial, the comparison, then as now very topical, between American art and European art.
