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Lot Essay
"The Disasters constitute a key moment in [Warhol's] work. Suddenly the sassy young man, who had burst on the scene with images of Campbell's Soup, Coca-Cola, dollar bills, and movie stars, was turning his attention to the death-obsessed underbelly of American life. These paintings must have been a tremendous shock when they first appeared, revealing that Pop Art was much more than an ironic joke for Warhol. With the Disasters, Warhol succeeded in separating himself from the other Pop artists, who, for the most part, continued to occupy themselves with the mechanics of mass-market image-making. He defined himself as an artist operating on a truly ambitious stage, willing to take on the big issues of human existence -mortality, the randomness of life and death, and the impersonal cruelty of state power. By so doing, he created a link for himself to not only the pessimistic humanism of Goya and Picasso, but, more importantly, to Abstract Expressionism and its existential and metaphysical concerns -concerns which had been mostly abandoned by the artists of the 60s"
(P. Halley, "Fifteen Little Electric Chairs," Andy Warhol Little Electric Chair Paintings, exh. cat. Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2001, p. 40).
Between 1962 and 1964, when Andy Warhol was making his most iconic and important works on canvas, he simultaneously created a small group of silkscreened works on Strathmore Drawing paper. Each work was silkscreened by hand, using the same silkscreens Warhol employed on his canvases, creating a unique image that retained the graininess and immediacy of the often shocking source imagery. Of the five silkscreen images Warhol chose to render on paper, three were from his “Death and Disaster” series. These are Race Riot, Suicide, and Ambulance Disaster.
The motif of car crashes and car accidents is one that Warhol returned to throughout the seminal period of production that occurred between 1962 and 1964. This motif is best realized in masterpieces such as Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), 1963, and the large Ambulance Disaster, 1964, belonging to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg. The car crash paintings encompass many of the themes that fascinated Warhol and inspired his best works: mortality, voyeurism, and the consumption of mass-media. These horrific images might seem to be an unlikely subject for art, but with through Warhol's perceptive eye, they become material for some of the most challenging and provocative paintings made by any artist in the post-war era.
The source image of Ambulance Disaster is an undated UPI photograph that documents the accidental collision of two ambulances that were returning from a car crash in Chicago. As the Warhol catalogue raisonné notes in the entry on the Ambulance Disaster paintings, the “two vehicles intended to save the lives had themselves becomes instruments of death.” The irony and can’t-look-away horror of the story, and of the image of the young woman thrown lifelessly from the ambulance window, represent Warhol at his darkest and most pure.
(P. Halley, "Fifteen Little Electric Chairs," Andy Warhol Little Electric Chair Paintings, exh. cat. Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2001, p. 40).
Between 1962 and 1964, when Andy Warhol was making his most iconic and important works on canvas, he simultaneously created a small group of silkscreened works on Strathmore Drawing paper. Each work was silkscreened by hand, using the same silkscreens Warhol employed on his canvases, creating a unique image that retained the graininess and immediacy of the often shocking source imagery. Of the five silkscreen images Warhol chose to render on paper, three were from his “Death and Disaster” series. These are Race Riot, Suicide, and Ambulance Disaster.
The motif of car crashes and car accidents is one that Warhol returned to throughout the seminal period of production that occurred between 1962 and 1964. This motif is best realized in masterpieces such as Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), 1963, and the large Ambulance Disaster, 1964, belonging to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg. The car crash paintings encompass many of the themes that fascinated Warhol and inspired his best works: mortality, voyeurism, and the consumption of mass-media. These horrific images might seem to be an unlikely subject for art, but with through Warhol's perceptive eye, they become material for some of the most challenging and provocative paintings made by any artist in the post-war era.
The source image of Ambulance Disaster is an undated UPI photograph that documents the accidental collision of two ambulances that were returning from a car crash in Chicago. As the Warhol catalogue raisonné notes in the entry on the Ambulance Disaster paintings, the “two vehicles intended to save the lives had themselves becomes instruments of death.” The irony and can’t-look-away horror of the story, and of the image of the young woman thrown lifelessly from the ambulance window, represent Warhol at his darkest and most pure.