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Lot Essay
‘They are like cut-out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet’s lily-pond’ (David Bourbon)
Against a striking monochromatic ground, vibrant petals bloom across three of Andy Warhol’s celebrated Flowers (lots 603-605). Each with exceptional provenance that includes the collections of David C. Copley and David Pincus, among others, the works were created between 1964 and 1965, when Warhol was at the peak of his celebrity. This vivid series continued his desire to transform quotidian objects into seductive icons. Across the paintings Warhol employed a rich and varied palette, whose tonal opulence can be seen in the three present works. While the Day-Glo colours may suggest an optimistic outlook, the Flowers can in fact be understood as a continuation of the artist’s sharp-eyed vision of consumption and culture, here extended into the natural world. Although Warhol was captivated by the glamour of celebrity and consumer culture, a darkness underpinned his oeuvre, encapsulated here by bright blooms which seem to exist at the nexus of life and death.
It was Henry Geldzahler, Warhol’s close friend and curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who selected the source image for the Flowers from the June 1964 issue of Modern Photograph, encouraging the artist to leave behind the macabre sentiments of his electric chairs and Death and Disaster paintings. Warhol kept the original photograph’s essential composition but flattened and abstracted what had once been a detailed shot of hibiscus flowers. He then ran the image through a Photostat machine several times to further eliminate superfluous details. The artist’s assistant, Billy Linich, recalled how Warhol ‘just wanted the shape, the basic outline, of the flowers’ (B. Linich quoted in T. Scherman and D. Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York 2009, p. 327). These flat shapes were stencilled in bright synthetic paint onto green or white grounds before the grass and stamens were applied in black ink through the silkscreen. The luminous blossoms stand in stark, slightly off-register contrast to the shadowy stems that surround them.
Warhol initially developed this body of work in the run-up to his solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, then the centre of the post-war art world, and the first series comprised two sizes, 48- and 24-inch squares. Over the course of the following year, however, he continued to reduce their scale, to fifteen inches, then eight, and finally five. Lots 603 and 605 are part of the final, five-inch series, while lot 604 belongs to the eight-inch cycle. This painting was included in Warhol’s 1965 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia: his first museum show in the United States and one which saw celebrity and artwork became forever intertwined. The opening was so mobbed by fans who wanted to see Warhol that the art had to be removed from the walls for its protection.
With their traditional subject matter, Warhol’s Flowers may appear to represent a departure from his previous work: bouquets have long been used by artists to explore ideas of decay, transience, and death. The blooms here loom almost menacingly large, threatening to overtake the frame and suggestive of a grandiose memento mori. As with his images of celebrities and socialites, the Flowers evince a similar fascination with surface glamour and the ways in which such images become commodified. Far from organic, the hibiscus blossoms have been manipulated and transformed into consumable images that stand in for rather than depict the natural world
The Flowers were among the last paintings that Warhol created during the 1960s. Although formally reductive and thus associated with the artist’s eventual embrace of abstraction, the series also prompts comparison to the floral fabrics popular during the 1960s Flower Power movement. Yet these paintings are far from romantic or even optimistic, and, with their dark backgrounds and charge of commercialisation, the Flowers also seem to foreshadow the social unease that would dog the 1970s. At once stylised and mediated, real yet constructed, the Flowers encapsulate the best of Warhol’s artistic interrogations by bridging the divide between fine art and mass consumption.
Against a striking monochromatic ground, vibrant petals bloom across three of Andy Warhol’s celebrated Flowers (lots 603-605). Each with exceptional provenance that includes the collections of David C. Copley and David Pincus, among others, the works were created between 1964 and 1965, when Warhol was at the peak of his celebrity. This vivid series continued his desire to transform quotidian objects into seductive icons. Across the paintings Warhol employed a rich and varied palette, whose tonal opulence can be seen in the three present works. While the Day-Glo colours may suggest an optimistic outlook, the Flowers can in fact be understood as a continuation of the artist’s sharp-eyed vision of consumption and culture, here extended into the natural world. Although Warhol was captivated by the glamour of celebrity and consumer culture, a darkness underpinned his oeuvre, encapsulated here by bright blooms which seem to exist at the nexus of life and death.
It was Henry Geldzahler, Warhol’s close friend and curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who selected the source image for the Flowers from the June 1964 issue of Modern Photograph, encouraging the artist to leave behind the macabre sentiments of his electric chairs and Death and Disaster paintings. Warhol kept the original photograph’s essential composition but flattened and abstracted what had once been a detailed shot of hibiscus flowers. He then ran the image through a Photostat machine several times to further eliminate superfluous details. The artist’s assistant, Billy Linich, recalled how Warhol ‘just wanted the shape, the basic outline, of the flowers’ (B. Linich quoted in T. Scherman and D. Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York 2009, p. 327). These flat shapes were stencilled in bright synthetic paint onto green or white grounds before the grass and stamens were applied in black ink through the silkscreen. The luminous blossoms stand in stark, slightly off-register contrast to the shadowy stems that surround them.
Warhol initially developed this body of work in the run-up to his solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, then the centre of the post-war art world, and the first series comprised two sizes, 48- and 24-inch squares. Over the course of the following year, however, he continued to reduce their scale, to fifteen inches, then eight, and finally five. Lots 603 and 605 are part of the final, five-inch series, while lot 604 belongs to the eight-inch cycle. This painting was included in Warhol’s 1965 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia: his first museum show in the United States and one which saw celebrity and artwork became forever intertwined. The opening was so mobbed by fans who wanted to see Warhol that the art had to be removed from the walls for its protection.
With their traditional subject matter, Warhol’s Flowers may appear to represent a departure from his previous work: bouquets have long been used by artists to explore ideas of decay, transience, and death. The blooms here loom almost menacingly large, threatening to overtake the frame and suggestive of a grandiose memento mori. As with his images of celebrities and socialites, the Flowers evince a similar fascination with surface glamour and the ways in which such images become commodified. Far from organic, the hibiscus blossoms have been manipulated and transformed into consumable images that stand in for rather than depict the natural world
The Flowers were among the last paintings that Warhol created during the 1960s. Although formally reductive and thus associated with the artist’s eventual embrace of abstraction, the series also prompts comparison to the floral fabrics popular during the 1960s Flower Power movement. Yet these paintings are far from romantic or even optimistic, and, with their dark backgrounds and charge of commercialisation, the Flowers also seem to foreshadow the social unease that would dog the 1970s. At once stylised and mediated, real yet constructed, the Flowers encapsulate the best of Warhol’s artistic interrogations by bridging the divide between fine art and mass consumption.