Beethoven by Warhol: Bonn exhibition reveals the making of a Pop Art icon

The Beethoven-Haus in Bonn has opened a major exhibition devoted to Andy Warhol’s celebrated image of Ludwig van Beethoven, tracing a project that began years before the artist’s death and ultimately transformed the composer into a Pop Art icon.

Beethoven by Warhol, running from 9 September 2026 to 5 April 2027, brings together more than 100 works and objects, including previously unseen works on paper and canvas, trial proofs, photographs, posters and other material. At its centre is Warhol’s four-part BEETHOVEN screenprint portfolio, completed shortly before his sudden death on 22 February 1987.

The exhibition reconstructs a story that can be traced back to 1979, when Warhol travelled to Bonn for an exhibition of his work. During the visit, he asked local businessman Sing Yang Chin for postcards showing the city’s best-known sights. Chin later recalled that the selection included images of Beethoven and probably the Beethoven-Haus.

Around seven years later, Bonn gallerist Hermann Wünsche, a friend of Warhol, proposed a Beethoven portrait intended for the celebrations of Bonn’s 2,000th anniversary in 1989. Warhol spent approximately a year developing the project, experimenting with different historical representations of the composer, including the Beethoven monument on Bonn’s Münsterplatz and a bust by Johann Baptist Schreiner.

Neither became the final image. Warhol eventually chose what had already become the most recognisable portrait of Beethoven: Joseph Karl Stieler’s 1820 painting of the composer holding the manuscript of the Missa solemnis. The original has belonged to the Beethoven-Haus since 1981.

Warhol, however, is unlikely to have seen it there. No visit by the artist to the Beethoven-Haus has been documented, and the exhibition’s research suggests that he probably worked from a black-and-white postcard reproducing Stieler’s portrait.

He combined that image with another source associated with the museum: Beethoven’s autograph manuscript of the Moonlight Sonata. More precisely, the notes that cross Warhol’s portrait come from the opening of the turbulent third movement, Presto agitato. The manuscript has been held by the Beethoven-Haus since 1898, and postcards reproducing the same passage were available at the museum.

The result was more than the addition of a musical background to a familiar portrait. Warhol placed Beethoven’s own handwriting directly across his face, giving the music and the man equal visual prominence. The exhibition describes this fusion of an authentic historical likeness and an autograph score as the most original aspect of Warhol’s conception.

The final portfolio was also the product of collaboration. Warhol’s master printer and Factory art director Rupert Jasen Smith produced 72 different colour combinations and appears to have played a significant role in selecting the four versions eventually issued. Warhol died before he could sign the completed prints; the published impressions consequently bear his estate stamp.

The exhibition also examines Warhol’s long relationship with music through a selection of his record covers. Over four decades, he illustrated or designed around 60 album covers, beginning years before he became one of the defining figures of Pop Art.

Nearly four decades after its creation, BEETHOVEN has become one of Warhol’s most recognisable late works. In the exhibition’s interpretation, Beethoven joins the artist’s gallery of celebrities: a historical composer subjected to the same mechanisms of repetition, mass reproduction and instant recognition that Warhol applied to the stars of film, music and politics.

Beethoven by Warhol remains at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn through 5 April 2027, a year marking both the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death and the 40th anniversary of Warhol’s.