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Lot Essay
The haunting image of an electric chair standing vacant and isolated in a room almost empty of everything save for a sign above the door commanding "SILENCE", is one of the most powerful and unforgettable icons in Warhol's art.
Executed in 1964, Four Electric Chairs is the quintessential image from the artist's celebrated 'Death and Disaster' series which was originally executed for an exhibition in Paris to be entitled Death in America. Because Warhol believed the French public would not be able to stomach the overt celebration of consumerist America of his Pop paintings, he sought for this exhibition to present a darker side of his Pop vision.
The origin for the series lies in the artist's portraits of Marilyn Monroe for, whilst he was painting the actress, Warhol recalled, "I realised that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio they said something like '4 million are going to die'. That started it." (Andy Warhol quoted in: G. Swenseon, 'Interview with Andy Warhol', Art News, New York, November 1963).
Borrowing dramatic images of the kind reproduced in popular American supermarket magazines like the National Enquirer, Warhol began a series of works that were essentially about the American way of death. Pictures of people commiting suicide by jumping from skyscrapers, the race riots of the American South and the underside of America's national obsession with the automobile - the car crash - were all catalogued by him in a series of dramatic and violent paintings.
As with his Campbell Soup Cans or his Coke Bottles, Warhol deliberately destroyed their uniqueness and much of their power to shock. John Cage observed of these works, "Andy fought by repetition to show us that there is no repetition really, that everything we look at is worthy of our attention". (....) The repulsive particulars of each 'Disaster' image dissolve in these works into a patterned abstraction that at first appears to be purely decoration or what Warhol himself described as being "like dress fabric".
In 1963, the electric chair in Sing Sing State Penitentiary, New York, performed the State's last two executions on Frederick Charles Wood on March 21 and Eddie Lee Mays on August 15. As a result, the subject of execution became extremely topical in the popular press but it was the instrument of execution itself that impressed Warhol as a "particularly American way to go."
The image Warhol chose of the electric chair remains the most powerful and disturbing of the 'Death and Disaster' pictures partly because in this iconic image there is no explicit violence, only the potential for it which is left to the viewer's imagination. In addition, this implicit violence is all the more powerful because it is both legal and state-sanctioned. The electric chair is a killing-machine manufactured by the same industrial system of mass production that produces Campbell Soup Cans and Coke Bottles. Without comment, Warhol produces the facts of the American death industry within one single iconic portrait.
Part of the original series which Warhol executed in 1964, Four Electric Chairs uses a cropped image of the original photograph in order to force the death-chair to the forefront of the picture. In addition, the artist has imprinted each of the four separate canvases with a particularly dark and grainy resolution that serves to emphasize the atmosphere of sinister foreboding. This dark and bold image is reinforced by a startling use of strong, flat and contrasting "decorator" colours for the background of each canvas. But, this is no decorative, repetitive painting that dissolves into "dress fabric." Rather it is a powerful grouping of paintings that when viewed collectively create the effect of each image vying with the others for the eye's attention; each fighting to convey the same shocking and iconic form of the vacant American death-machine.
Executed in 1964, Four Electric Chairs is the quintessential image from the artist's celebrated 'Death and Disaster' series which was originally executed for an exhibition in Paris to be entitled Death in America. Because Warhol believed the French public would not be able to stomach the overt celebration of consumerist America of his Pop paintings, he sought for this exhibition to present a darker side of his Pop vision.
The origin for the series lies in the artist's portraits of Marilyn Monroe for, whilst he was painting the actress, Warhol recalled, "I realised that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio they said something like '4 million are going to die'. That started it." (Andy Warhol quoted in: G. Swenseon, 'Interview with Andy Warhol', Art News, New York, November 1963).
Borrowing dramatic images of the kind reproduced in popular American supermarket magazines like the National Enquirer, Warhol began a series of works that were essentially about the American way of death. Pictures of people commiting suicide by jumping from skyscrapers, the race riots of the American South and the underside of America's national obsession with the automobile - the car crash - were all catalogued by him in a series of dramatic and violent paintings.
As with his Campbell Soup Cans or his Coke Bottles, Warhol deliberately destroyed their uniqueness and much of their power to shock. John Cage observed of these works, "Andy fought by repetition to show us that there is no repetition really, that everything we look at is worthy of our attention". (....) The repulsive particulars of each 'Disaster' image dissolve in these works into a patterned abstraction that at first appears to be purely decoration or what Warhol himself described as being "like dress fabric".
In 1963, the electric chair in Sing Sing State Penitentiary, New York, performed the State's last two executions on Frederick Charles Wood on March 21 and Eddie Lee Mays on August 15. As a result, the subject of execution became extremely topical in the popular press but it was the instrument of execution itself that impressed Warhol as a "particularly American way to go."
The image Warhol chose of the electric chair remains the most powerful and disturbing of the 'Death and Disaster' pictures partly because in this iconic image there is no explicit violence, only the potential for it which is left to the viewer's imagination. In addition, this implicit violence is all the more powerful because it is both legal and state-sanctioned. The electric chair is a killing-machine manufactured by the same industrial system of mass production that produces Campbell Soup Cans and Coke Bottles. Without comment, Warhol produces the facts of the American death industry within one single iconic portrait.
Part of the original series which Warhol executed in 1964, Four Electric Chairs uses a cropped image of the original photograph in order to force the death-chair to the forefront of the picture. In addition, the artist has imprinted each of the four separate canvases with a particularly dark and grainy resolution that serves to emphasize the atmosphere of sinister foreboding. This dark and bold image is reinforced by a startling use of strong, flat and contrasting "decorator" colours for the background of each canvas. But, this is no decorative, repetitive painting that dissolves into "dress fabric." Rather it is a powerful grouping of paintings that when viewed collectively create the effect of each image vying with the others for the eye's attention; each fighting to convey the same shocking and iconic form of the vacant American death-machine.