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拍品專文
This monumental image of the macabre apparatus first designed in the 1880s and consequently used by U.S. State penitentiaries to kill people who had been sentenced to death by the state, is the ultimate symbol of Warhol's celebrated "Death and Disaster" series and one of the most powerful icons of man's violence against man in the history of 20th Century art.
Measuring almost two meters in width, Big Electric Chair is part of a series of fourteen giant paintings of this simple but highly provocative image that Warhol produced during the "summer of love" in 1967 for an exhibition of his work at the Moderne Museet in Stockholm the following year. Using a close-up of the chair that has been cropped from the original source photograph, Warhol thrusts the bizarre killing machine with its metal plate, and loose hanging leather straps to the forefront of the picture and drenches the scene in an acidic flame orange and a deliberately clashing caustic green. The use of these searing colours has the wholly appropriate effect of presenting the image of the chair as if its form had been burnt onto the canvas by some explosive chemical experiment.
Warhol first chose to portray the electric chair in 1963 as part of a series of works he intended to show in Paris under the title "Death in America". Following on from his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol recalled that he one day "realised that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labour Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio they said something like '4 million are going to die'. That started it." (Interview with Gene Swenson, Artnews, 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 obssession with the automobile - the car crash - were all catalogued by him in a series of shockingly violent paintings.
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 bizarre instrument of execution itself that impressed Warhol, striking him as a "particularly American way to go".
Although it is uncertain whether the image Warhol chose is the Sing Sing chair, his Electric Chair paintings remain the most powerful and disturbing of the "Death and Disaster" pictures 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 presents the facts of the American death industry within one haunting iconic portrait.
The scale of the present work, its vibrant contrasting colours that endow the subject matter with the intensity of a dark room image and the close cropping of the image that stresses the emptiness of the space and focuses our attention on the chair, all combine in this work to produce one of the most striking and powerful of all of Warhol's highly poignant electric chair paintings.
"It's just that people go by 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." (op. cit., p. 143.)
In 1964, Warhol collaborated with his assistant Gerard Malanga on a series of poems, one of which was dedicated to the Electric Chair pictures:
"The chair in a room marked silent by signs
Over the door,
The flames coming towards us - -
Accidents of some future date,
We sit on couches, but the sleep
And ideas persist
Knowing we gain from it ,
To fall apart again,
Some simplicities first
Then nothing - night
The secret, viable .... next day, or next week
On the telephone. The film
Measuring almost two meters in width, Big Electric Chair is part of a series of fourteen giant paintings of this simple but highly provocative image that Warhol produced during the "summer of love" in 1967 for an exhibition of his work at the Moderne Museet in Stockholm the following year. Using a close-up of the chair that has been cropped from the original source photograph, Warhol thrusts the bizarre killing machine with its metal plate, and loose hanging leather straps to the forefront of the picture and drenches the scene in an acidic flame orange and a deliberately clashing caustic green. The use of these searing colours has the wholly appropriate effect of presenting the image of the chair as if its form had been burnt onto the canvas by some explosive chemical experiment.
Warhol first chose to portray the electric chair in 1963 as part of a series of works he intended to show in Paris under the title "Death in America". Following on from his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol recalled that he one day "realised that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labour Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio they said something like '4 million are going to die'. That started it." (Interview with Gene Swenson, Artnews, 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 obssession with the automobile - the car crash - were all catalogued by him in a series of shockingly violent paintings.
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 bizarre instrument of execution itself that impressed Warhol, striking him as a "particularly American way to go".
Although it is uncertain whether the image Warhol chose is the Sing Sing chair, his Electric Chair paintings remain the most powerful and disturbing of the "Death and Disaster" pictures 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 presents the facts of the American death industry within one haunting iconic portrait.
The scale of the present work, its vibrant contrasting colours that endow the subject matter with the intensity of a dark room image and the close cropping of the image that stresses the emptiness of the space and focuses our attention on the chair, all combine in this work to produce one of the most striking and powerful of all of Warhol's highly poignant electric chair paintings.
"It's just that people go by 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." (op. cit., p. 143.)
In 1964, Warhol collaborated with his assistant Gerard Malanga on a series of poems, one of which was dedicated to the Electric Chair pictures:
"The chair in a room marked silent by signs
Over the door,
The flames coming towards us - -
Accidents of some future date,
We sit on couches, but the sleep
And ideas persist
Knowing we gain from it ,
To fall apart again,
Some simplicities first
Then nothing - night
The secret, viable .... next day, or next week
On the telephone. The film