“Reigning Queens” in the Pop Art Style

“Reigning Queens” in the pop art style. In the Netherlands, at Het Loo Palace, a series of portraits of women on the throne, created by Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s, has been put on show. At that time four queens headed monarchies: Elizabeth, the United Kingdom; Beatrix, the Netherlands; Margrethe, Denmark; and Ntfombi, Swaziland, today's Eswatini. All of them came to the throne by right of birth and shared power with no husbands. What also united them was a refusal to sit in person for the American artist, who had to make do with publicly available photographs.

The artist believed that his “Reigning Queens” had not been sufficiently appreciated. That claim was refuted a few days ago, when two stencils from this very series were stolen from a gallery in another Dutch town, Oisterwijk. “A Dutch art dealer wanted to present this series here, in our palace. And only two years after these portraits were created, they were acquired for our collection. Now we are the only museum in Europe that has the complete set of ‘Reigning Queens’,” the exhibition's curator, Hanna Clarenbeek, said.