The galleries are ever-changing, exhibiting works arranged in an integrated, interdisciplinary manner. With film, video, and archival materials shown together with paintings, prints, and drawings, the museum offers the visitor a comprehensive presentation of the development of Warhol's work.

On view on the Fourth Floor: Silver Clouds

Created for a 1966 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Warhol created an environment that included one room filled with Silver Clouds, helium-filled balloons which moved with the air currents. In addition to creating an ethereal, joyful atmosphere, they challenged traditional expectations by mingling with and touching the viewer.

Made of helium and oxygen-filled metalized plastic film, the Silver Clouds were created with the assistance of Billy Klüver, an engineer and one of a group who sought to bring together artists and new technology. After seeing the Silver Clouds, choreographer Merce Cunningham was inspired to include the work in a new dance piece, RainForest, which premiered in 1968 and included choreography by Cunningham, music by David Tudor, set by Warhol, and costumes by Jasper Johns.

After traveling around the world in 1956, Andy Warhol decided that his ambitions exceeded the bounds of the commercial art world. For the first time since his student years, he returned to painting on canvas. Warhol enlarged images from newspaper and magazine advertisements, comic strips, and other mundane sources of popular culture and making hand-painted painting like Coca-Cola (1960), Telephone (1960)and Campbell's Soup Cans (1960-62). In 1962 he developed the technique of silkscreening images directly onto canvas, using commercial labels, film stills and other photographs as subjects. His Elvis, Liz, Marilyn and other paintings of film stars became definitive emblems of American Pop art. Warhol, his entourage of Superstars and his silver-painted studio -- known as the Factory -- became world-famous.

Warhol began to make films in 1963. In addition to being projected daily at the Museum theatre, his early films -- such as Sleep and Empire -- have been transferred to videodisc and are shown continuously in a gallery adjacent to his 1960s paintings, prints and drawings of film stars.

The death and disaster paintings of 1962-63 are among the most powerful and disturbing expressions of Warhol's constant fascination with, and injury and death -- themes which permeate his work and are present in even the most beautiful of his portraits.

Much of Andy Warhol's work is about portraiture, the traditional art of representing a subject's personality and identity. He used every medium at his disposal to explore the glamour of youth and beauty, the passage of time and the presence of death. In the collection of self-portraits at the entrance gallery, each of these themes, which remained important to Warhol throughout his life and appear throughout his work, can be found in his images of himself. Andy Warhol started painting portraits on commission in the early 1960s, and this developed into a significant aspect of his career. Many of his subjects were well-known in international social circles, the art world and the entertainment industry -- realms which had fascinated Warhol since his youth and which had now embraced him as one of their own.