WARHOL ART COLORS MUSEUM'S NEW WALLS.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Soup's on!

Art lovers can start salivating now that the walls are no longer all blank at the University of Oregon's newly expanded art museum. Workers have begun hanging more than 100 works by pop icon Andy Warhol - including his famous Campbell's Soup cans - in preparation for the big January opening.

The exhibit will be the first in the new traveling exhibits gallery at the museum, now known as the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

With the museum closed for more than four years, staff members couldn't wait to start opening crates and hanging the brilliantly colored Warhol screenprints on loan from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

"There are wonderful things we can do in this space we could never do before," said Lawrence Fong, the museum's associate director, as 10 poster-sized, psychedelic-hued prints of Marilyn Monroe gazed over his shoulder. "We didn't have the scale. We couldn't have done this with 8-foot ceilings."

Having 14-foot ceilings makes things a lot easier, especially when a block of nine Marilyns or Campbell's stands 10 feet tall.

The show includes some of Warhol's best-known works, including his images of Mao Tse-tung, Mick Jagger and Jacqueline Kennedy, as well as his glittery "Shadows I" and "Shoes" and the "Ten Portraits of Jews in the Twentieth Century" and "Cowboys and Indians" series.

The Warhols, all original screenprints, are part of the touring "Andy Warhol's Dream America" show scheduled for stops around the West. It includes a large catalog, but Fong and museum director David Turner soon decided that the new space had so much potential that they needed more.

"We started with 88, then David and I got very excited and we asked Jordan (Schnitzer) for more pieces and he added 24 to that," Fong said.

The Warhol exhibit is the first to be installed in the remodeled and expanded museum, which is now more than twice the space of the original. Works in the new European gallery will go up next, and the Korean and Chinese galleries will follow.

Many of the galleries are still awash with packing crates, as museum staff members continue the work of returning the collection to the renovated, state-of-the-art storage center in the basement. Newsprint cutouts line some of the gallery walls, marked with names such as "Rembrandt" to show where pieces will be hung.

Turner said designing the exhibits and deciding which pieces to display and where has been happy work following the long years of packing up, construction and moving back.

"It feels so much like we've moved into a big, new, grand home and you have to lay things out to see what will fit," he said. "It's going to show off very well."

Laying out the Warhol exhibit was a case in point. They started with a 1/50th-scale model and went through three designs before pasting full-scale newsprint mock-ups on the walls, looking for the best way to display the works.

"Just the fact that we could handle a show of such scope meant we could guide the viewers through the impact of the pieces," Turner said. "There's a lot of discovery as you walk through the space, and this is a perfect contemporary show to show off this contemporary space."

And as exciting as the Warhol show is, it's only the cherry on a very artistic cake.

The whole package will be ready to greet the public Jan. 23, the date set for the grand reopening.

Some familiar pieces will be back, such as the "Indian Maiden and Fawn" sculpture, and the much-loved Campbell Courtyard will reopen. The grand staircase is gone, but in its place are twin stairways washed in daylight filtered through alabaster-paneled windows.

Other old friends, including the Jade Pagoda and samurai armor, won't be back on display until September. New attractions, including expanded galleries and a cafe and a larger museum gift shop, will offer new diversions.

Turner said the Warhol exhibit will be a great way to introduce the museum's fans to all that's new in the 72-year-old building. "I think it's just great that that's the exclamation mark," he said. "I think the museum will look really new to everybody who knows it."

MUSEUM OPENING

The Andy Warhol exhibit kicks off the reopening of the University of Oregon art museum.

Grand opening: Jan. 23 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; free admission one day only

Regular hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 11 a.m.

to 8 p.m. Wednesdays; closed Mondays and Tuesdays

CAPTION(S):

Rick Gehrke prepares the Andy Warhol exhibit at the University of Oregon's expanded art museum in preparation for its January opening.