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Lot Essay
Three Women is a large and unique work made by Warhol in the summer of 1963. Belonging to a rare series of paintings dealing with shocking images from the media that were originally classified by Rainer Crone as 'Documetary Images' it is a work that forms an important part of the artist's extensive exploration of 'death and disaster' in America.
Starting with the Marilyns, executed only weeks after the film star's suicide in August 1962, Warhol began a series of paintings that dealt specifically with the dark and sinister underside of fame and celebrity. Warhol's iconic but disturbing portraits of Marilyn Monroe had simultaneously encapsulated the popular pin-up image of the star and the shallow synthetic and addictive nature of her fame that had led ultimately to her despair and suicide. These works marked a turning point in his art. They combined the warm, homely and comforting qualities and colour of American consumerism that Warhol had celebrated in his portraits of Campbell Soup Cans and Coca Cola bottles with a ghostly shadow of tragedy and death. From the Marilyns onwards, a cold, dark, existential awareness of the ever-presence of death seems to underscore almost all of Warhol's work. In the immediate aftermath of this famous series Warhol became, for a time, completely engrossed in a pictorial exploration of a darker and lesser-known side of the American media, creating the series known as 'Death and Disaster'.
From his portraits of Liz Taylor done 'when everyone thought she was dying' to his series of car-crashes and suicides, Warhol concentrated throughout late 1962 and most of 1963 on a series of works which he intended to be part of an exhibition on the theme of 'Death in America'. As source-material for this exhibition, Warhol drew on rare and often gruesome or shocking images that appeared in unpublished press photographs and peripheral or local media. These images were the antithesis of the mainstream instantly-recognisable icons that had dominated his art up to this point, and were part of a deliberate act on the artist's part to attempt to reintegrate this small-town, almost 'hidden' media into the mainstream through his art. "People go by" he once said, "and it doesn't really matter to them that someone unknown was killed, so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who ordinarily wouldn't think of them" (G. Berg, 'Nothing to Lose: interview with Andy Warhol' in Cahiers du Cinema in English, May 1967, p. 42).
Foremost amongst such gruesome imagery were photographs of suicides and car crashes which, though they were often drawn from magazines, have the appearance of unpublished police photography. This kind of candid or underground documentary imagery sometimes published in sensationalist publications such as the National Enquirer, held an increasing appeal for Warhol at this time. As he observed to Gene Swenson in an interview he gave in November 1963, he was eager to obtain even more horrific images from police sources but they wouldn't let him have them. "Did you see the Enquirer this week?" he asked Swenson, "It had 'The Wreck that Made Cops Cry' - a head cut in half, the arms and hands just lying there. It's sick, but I'm sure it happens all the time. I've, met a lot of cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only its impossible to get pictures from them", (Interview with Gene Swenson. Art News, New York, November 1963, in Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell 1992, p. 732).
Central to Warhol's concern with such horrific imagery was his interest in the way in which it was used by the media to instill fear so as to perpetuate a story, and also how quickly people adapted to such imagery and how, through repetition, the shock value would quickly dissipate. "It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday', he recalled, and every time you turned on the radio, they said something like '4 million are going to die'. That started it (The Death and Disaster series). But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect" (Interview with Gene Swenson, ibid).
Three Women was painted between June and July 1963 at the height of Warhol's fascination with such imagery. Using a repeated image of a press photograph of three prostitutes caught in a vice raid on an upmarket New York apartment covering their faces with pillows so as to avoid being recognised, the painting seems to explore and express the horror of unwanted celebrity. Sprayed with silver paint in the manner of many of Warhol's celebrity portraits of 'stars' from the 'silver screen', this image, repeated in a double strip across the top of a silver canvas seems ironically imbued in a shimmering silver mist of stardom.
The source photo that Warhol has used in this work was only recently discovered in one of Warhol's 'time-capsules'. Marked-up by the artist for enlargement to the dimensions used in this work it is a UPI wire-service photograph dating from 1960. The caption that accompanies the photograph reads: 'Netted in V-raid. New York: motivated by sentiments stronger than maidenly modesty, three alleged call girls cover up after they were netted in a police vice raid at an upper Manhattan apartment building here early May 21 st. A fourth girl and a taxi driver were also picked up on vice charges. A man described as the ring leader of the operation is being sought. Police said cab drivers steered customers to the call girls.'
The image itself is a bizarre, almost surreal one that at first glance looks more sinister and gruesome than it actually is. The mangled assortment of limbs and the difficult readability of the figures recalls other images used by Warhol in his car-crash and suicide paintings, while the pillows used to cover the faces also appear macabre and render the women not just anonymous but also seemingly inanimate. Screened in a grainy black print over the canvas, the image emerges from the void with all the sombre realism of newsprint while conjuring associations with a film-noir private detective story. The fact that Warhol intended to follow up his death and disaster series with a further exploration of pornographic imagery, seems no surprise when looking at this work.
Warhol has repeated the photograph of the three call-girls across the top of the painting in two lines of six while leaving the lower half of the image blank. This layout relates the work closely to other disaster paintings of this period such as Silver Disaster (Electric Chair) (Froehlich Collection Stuttgart), Tuna Fish Disaster (cat. rais. no. 376) and Silver Car Crash (351) in which the artist introduced both silver paint and the blank as an important design feature of his work. The blank, which also became incorporated into Warhol's work as a separate monochrome canvas, emphasised the seemingly shallow fleeting nature of his photographic film-based imagery while also reinforcing its stark visual power. This use of the blank was part of an abstracting tendency that Warhol liked, particularly in conjunction with his harshest or most gruesome images because, like repetition, he felt, it further reduced the particulars of the image to a patterned abstraction that he once described as being, 'like dress fabric'.
As in Silver Car Crash(351) in Three Women Warhol has also taken the rare step of spray painting silver paint over the image rather than silkscreen printing over a silver background as was his usual practice. The spray painting in Three Women is not evenly placed but has been applied in such a way as to partially obscure the images at the edge of the canvas, lending their appearance further the sense of emerging from a silver mist onto the plane of the canvas. In other silver paintings of this period, Warhol experimented with uneven screening to achieve a similar variety of effect or 'ghosting', as his assistant Gerard Malanga, who introduced him to the technique, referred to it.
Because it is that rarest of things in Warhol's work, a unique work, Three Women has often been classified along with other unique 'documentary' paintings from the period such as Atomic Bomb, (Daros Collection), Gangster Funeral (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg), and Hospital (The Andy Warhol Museum). In the recent catalogue raisonné of Warhol's work it is grouped, somewhat strangely, with other silver paintings deriving from the movies such as Silver Liz Silver Marlon, Silver Cagney and a Silver Kiss (Bela Lugosi) which were all made at around the same time. Relating both to the death and disaster series and to his images of celebrities, Three Women was in fact painted on the same roll of canvas as the Silver Cagney now in the Collection Marx in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Heiner Bastian, the first owner of Three Women recalls waiting for Warhol on a Saturday morning in 1981 in front of the Factory in Union Square. Warhol reportedly arrived in a taxi with a big role of canvas sticking out of the rear window. In the studio he unrolled the canvas in the presence of Dr Marx and, there, assisted by Fred Hughes cut the two paintings Cagney and Three Women apart. (Heiner Bastian, Marx Collection, Andy Warhol - Early Drawings, Berlin 1996).
Starting with the Marilyns, executed only weeks after the film star's suicide in August 1962, Warhol began a series of paintings that dealt specifically with the dark and sinister underside of fame and celebrity. Warhol's iconic but disturbing portraits of Marilyn Monroe had simultaneously encapsulated the popular pin-up image of the star and the shallow synthetic and addictive nature of her fame that had led ultimately to her despair and suicide. These works marked a turning point in his art. They combined the warm, homely and comforting qualities and colour of American consumerism that Warhol had celebrated in his portraits of Campbell Soup Cans and Coca Cola bottles with a ghostly shadow of tragedy and death. From the Marilyns onwards, a cold, dark, existential awareness of the ever-presence of death seems to underscore almost all of Warhol's work. In the immediate aftermath of this famous series Warhol became, for a time, completely engrossed in a pictorial exploration of a darker and lesser-known side of the American media, creating the series known as 'Death and Disaster'.
From his portraits of Liz Taylor done 'when everyone thought she was dying' to his series of car-crashes and suicides, Warhol concentrated throughout late 1962 and most of 1963 on a series of works which he intended to be part of an exhibition on the theme of 'Death in America'. As source-material for this exhibition, Warhol drew on rare and often gruesome or shocking images that appeared in unpublished press photographs and peripheral or local media. These images were the antithesis of the mainstream instantly-recognisable icons that had dominated his art up to this point, and were part of a deliberate act on the artist's part to attempt to reintegrate this small-town, almost 'hidden' media into the mainstream through his art. "People go by" he once said, "and it doesn't really matter to them that someone unknown was killed, so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who ordinarily wouldn't think of them" (G. Berg, 'Nothing to Lose: interview with Andy Warhol' in Cahiers du Cinema in English, May 1967, p. 42).
Foremost amongst such gruesome imagery were photographs of suicides and car crashes which, though they were often drawn from magazines, have the appearance of unpublished police photography. This kind of candid or underground documentary imagery sometimes published in sensationalist publications such as the National Enquirer, held an increasing appeal for Warhol at this time. As he observed to Gene Swenson in an interview he gave in November 1963, he was eager to obtain even more horrific images from police sources but they wouldn't let him have them. "Did you see the Enquirer this week?" he asked Swenson, "It had 'The Wreck that Made Cops Cry' - a head cut in half, the arms and hands just lying there. It's sick, but I'm sure it happens all the time. I've, met a lot of cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only its impossible to get pictures from them", (Interview with Gene Swenson. Art News, New York, November 1963, in Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell 1992, p. 732).
Central to Warhol's concern with such horrific imagery was his interest in the way in which it was used by the media to instill fear so as to perpetuate a story, and also how quickly people adapted to such imagery and how, through repetition, the shock value would quickly dissipate. "It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday', he recalled, and every time you turned on the radio, they said something like '4 million are going to die'. That started it (The Death and Disaster series). But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect" (Interview with Gene Swenson, ibid).
Three Women was painted between June and July 1963 at the height of Warhol's fascination with such imagery. Using a repeated image of a press photograph of three prostitutes caught in a vice raid on an upmarket New York apartment covering their faces with pillows so as to avoid being recognised, the painting seems to explore and express the horror of unwanted celebrity. Sprayed with silver paint in the manner of many of Warhol's celebrity portraits of 'stars' from the 'silver screen', this image, repeated in a double strip across the top of a silver canvas seems ironically imbued in a shimmering silver mist of stardom.
The source photo that Warhol has used in this work was only recently discovered in one of Warhol's 'time-capsules'. Marked-up by the artist for enlargement to the dimensions used in this work it is a UPI wire-service photograph dating from 1960. The caption that accompanies the photograph reads: 'Netted in V-raid. New York: motivated by sentiments stronger than maidenly modesty, three alleged call girls cover up after they were netted in a police vice raid at an upper Manhattan apartment building here early May 21 st. A fourth girl and a taxi driver were also picked up on vice charges. A man described as the ring leader of the operation is being sought. Police said cab drivers steered customers to the call girls.'
The image itself is a bizarre, almost surreal one that at first glance looks more sinister and gruesome than it actually is. The mangled assortment of limbs and the difficult readability of the figures recalls other images used by Warhol in his car-crash and suicide paintings, while the pillows used to cover the faces also appear macabre and render the women not just anonymous but also seemingly inanimate. Screened in a grainy black print over the canvas, the image emerges from the void with all the sombre realism of newsprint while conjuring associations with a film-noir private detective story. The fact that Warhol intended to follow up his death and disaster series with a further exploration of pornographic imagery, seems no surprise when looking at this work.
Warhol has repeated the photograph of the three call-girls across the top of the painting in two lines of six while leaving the lower half of the image blank. This layout relates the work closely to other disaster paintings of this period such as Silver Disaster (Electric Chair) (Froehlich Collection Stuttgart), Tuna Fish Disaster (cat. rais. no. 376) and Silver Car Crash (351) in which the artist introduced both silver paint and the blank as an important design feature of his work. The blank, which also became incorporated into Warhol's work as a separate monochrome canvas, emphasised the seemingly shallow fleeting nature of his photographic film-based imagery while also reinforcing its stark visual power. This use of the blank was part of an abstracting tendency that Warhol liked, particularly in conjunction with his harshest or most gruesome images because, like repetition, he felt, it further reduced the particulars of the image to a patterned abstraction that he once described as being, 'like dress fabric'.
As in Silver Car Crash(351) in Three Women Warhol has also taken the rare step of spray painting silver paint over the image rather than silkscreen printing over a silver background as was his usual practice. The spray painting in Three Women is not evenly placed but has been applied in such a way as to partially obscure the images at the edge of the canvas, lending their appearance further the sense of emerging from a silver mist onto the plane of the canvas. In other silver paintings of this period, Warhol experimented with uneven screening to achieve a similar variety of effect or 'ghosting', as his assistant Gerard Malanga, who introduced him to the technique, referred to it.
Because it is that rarest of things in Warhol's work, a unique work, Three Women has often been classified along with other unique 'documentary' paintings from the period such as Atomic Bomb, (Daros Collection), Gangster Funeral (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg), and Hospital (The Andy Warhol Museum). In the recent catalogue raisonné of Warhol's work it is grouped, somewhat strangely, with other silver paintings deriving from the movies such as Silver Liz Silver Marlon, Silver Cagney and a Silver Kiss (Bela Lugosi) which were all made at around the same time. Relating both to the death and disaster series and to his images of celebrities, Three Women was in fact painted on the same roll of canvas as the Silver Cagney now in the Collection Marx in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Heiner Bastian, the first owner of Three Women recalls waiting for Warhol on a Saturday morning in 1981 in front of the Factory in Union Square. Warhol reportedly arrived in a taxi with a big role of canvas sticking out of the rear window. In the studio he unrolled the canvas in the presence of Dr Marx and, there, assisted by Fred Hughes cut the two paintings Cagney and Three Women apart. (Heiner Bastian, Marx Collection, Andy Warhol - Early Drawings, Berlin 1996).