.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Cornered up against a wall, Andy Warhol’s depiction of the legendary actor James Cagney is one of the most iconic representations of the American gangster in popular culture. Using a publicity photograph of the American acting icon, Cagney is also one of the first works in which the artist casts his acerbic eye over the Hollywood fame machine. This would provide a rich seam of inspiration and the resulting works—from Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) to Silver Liz (1962, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) and his totemic images of Elvis Presley—have become some of the most celebrated paintings that Warhol ever produced. Cagney also displays Warhol’s interest in the theme of violence in America, which would develop into his celebrated Death and Disaster series. Depicting a defiant James Cagney, this work becomes a portrait of the ultimate anti-hero, capturing the essence of America’s fascination with the gun and with the mobster several years before Hollywood capitalized on it with movies such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather.
One of only seven known unique works on paper that Warhol made using this particular screen (the only canvas version resides in the collection of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), the origins of the source image that the artist used to produce this work has recently been thrown into question. For many years scholars assumed that it was a publicity photo used to promote Cagney’s 1931 movie, The Public Enemy. This was an idea propagated to some extent by Warhol himself who mentioned the film not only to dealer Heiner Bastian but also to Rainer Crone in the 1960s and whose book, Andy Warhol, became the original de facto early catalogue raisonné. This “fact” made its way into an early Warhol catalogue raisonné of prints and even the prestigious catalogue raisonné of paintings and has subsequently been repeated by many other publications. However, research by Wendy Weitman, in preparation for her 1999 exhibition, Pop Impressions Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from The Museum of Modern Art, has revealed that the source actually comes from the 1938 classic Angles with Dirty Faces (J. Brody, “Andy Warhol’s Cagney Prints,” Print Quarterly, XXVI, 2009, p. 146). Of the seven known versions on paper, four are in public institutions including the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Cagney, with its depiction of gun violence, proved to be particularly prescient for Warhol. Working from his home on November 22, 1963, Warhol and Gerald Malanga were silkscreening The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) when news of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s assassination broke. Like the rest of the nation, Warhol was deeply affected by these events and would himself later become involved in two gun incidents. Once, in September 1964, when fellow artist Dorothy Podber shot through a stack of Marilyn paintings that Warhol had in his studio and, more seriously, in 1968 when radical feminist Valerie Solanas appeared at the Factory and shot at him and at his friends. Though three shots were fired at the artist, a single bullet had ricocheted through his spleen, liver, pancreas, esophagus, and both lungs when Solanas had corned the artist underneath his desk, holding the gun against his flesh.
Ever ambiguous, in Cagney, Warhol manages to present us with something that contains the possibility of death and violence yet at the same time celebrates the glamour of Hollywood and the silver screen. As with so much of Warhol’s work, it contains an intriguing duality that portrays two conflicting emotions. It is a thrillingly opaque picture that today continues to confront, defy and engage its viewer and it is perhaps for this reason that Warhol’s Cagney works sets an enticing precedent for much of what was to follow.
One of only seven known unique works on paper that Warhol made using this particular screen (the only canvas version resides in the collection of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), the origins of the source image that the artist used to produce this work has recently been thrown into question. For many years scholars assumed that it was a publicity photo used to promote Cagney’s 1931 movie, The Public Enemy. This was an idea propagated to some extent by Warhol himself who mentioned the film not only to dealer Heiner Bastian but also to Rainer Crone in the 1960s and whose book, Andy Warhol, became the original de facto early catalogue raisonné. This “fact” made its way into an early Warhol catalogue raisonné of prints and even the prestigious catalogue raisonné of paintings and has subsequently been repeated by many other publications. However, research by Wendy Weitman, in preparation for her 1999 exhibition, Pop Impressions Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from The Museum of Modern Art, has revealed that the source actually comes from the 1938 classic Angles with Dirty Faces (J. Brody, “Andy Warhol’s Cagney Prints,” Print Quarterly, XXVI, 2009, p. 146). Of the seven known versions on paper, four are in public institutions including the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Cagney, with its depiction of gun violence, proved to be particularly prescient for Warhol. Working from his home on November 22, 1963, Warhol and Gerald Malanga were silkscreening The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) when news of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s assassination broke. Like the rest of the nation, Warhol was deeply affected by these events and would himself later become involved in two gun incidents. Once, in September 1964, when fellow artist Dorothy Podber shot through a stack of Marilyn paintings that Warhol had in his studio and, more seriously, in 1968 when radical feminist Valerie Solanas appeared at the Factory and shot at him and at his friends. Though three shots were fired at the artist, a single bullet had ricocheted through his spleen, liver, pancreas, esophagus, and both lungs when Solanas had corned the artist underneath his desk, holding the gun against his flesh.
Ever ambiguous, in Cagney, Warhol manages to present us with something that contains the possibility of death and violence yet at the same time celebrates the glamour of Hollywood and the silver screen. As with so much of Warhol’s work, it contains an intriguing duality that portrays two conflicting emotions. It is a thrillingly opaque picture that today continues to confront, defy and engage its viewer and it is perhaps for this reason that Warhol’s Cagney works sets an enticing precedent for much of what was to follow.