Flowers

Andy Warhol's depictions of flowers are amongst his most iconic works. Warhol began creating silkscreen prints of the subject in 1964, in both black & white and bright, bold colors, repeating the image multiple times on the same canvas. They are notable for their flat, almost graphic quality, which makes them look more like advertisements or commercial packaging than traditional fine art. By depicting flowers in this way, Warhol was able to comment on the mass production and commercialization of art, as well as explore the intersection between high and low culture. The flowers themselves are often depicted in a stylized, almost cartoonish way, which further emphasizes their artificiality and reinforces the idea of them as consumer objects.

The original concept came, as with several other iconic Warhol images, not from Warhol himself, but from an idea provided by a close associate – in this instance Henry Geldzahler, the artist’s friend and then-curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During a visit to the Factory “I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death,” Geldzahler recalled. “I said, ‘Andy, maybe it’s enough death now.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, how about this?’ I opened a magazine to four flowers.”

Fortuitously there was a copy of the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography to hand. It contained a foldout of four photographs of seven hibiscus blossoms taken by Patricia Caulfield, the magazine’s executive editor. Adapting the source photograph for painting, Warhol made substantial alterations, cropping it into a square composed of only four large flowers and rotating the individual blossoms. Crucially, he then ran the photo repeatedly through an early photocopy machine, then the latest in technology. The objective was to turn the image from a photo into an almost abstract representation of flowers.