Lot Essay
In 1984 Warhol began a series of large-scale works known as Rorschach paintings after the abstract ink blots that Swiss pychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised for psychological testing in the early twentieth century. Rather than appropriate the ten standard ink blots typically employed in the scientific study of personality, Warhol created free-form imagery based on his own misinterpretation of the functionality of the Rorschach test. Warhol said, "I thought that when you go to places like hospitals, they tell you to draw and make Rorschach tests. I wish I'd known there was a [standardized] set" (quoted in R. Krauss, Andy Warhol Rorschach Paintings, New York, 1996, p. 5).
Warhol's Rorschach paintings, made by pouring black pigment in an abstract configuration on one half of a canvas and then folding the canvas to create a seemingly symmetrical marking, provided Warhol with a simple visual vocabulary with which to explore the cross-polination of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Greenbergian formalism. Recalling the automatic calligraphy of the Surrealists and the individuality of the mark as embraced by the Abstract Expressionists, Warhol's Rorschach paintings reveal an insistence on non-mimemtic, abstract imagery to convey a legible and highly personal subject matter. Rosalind Krauss has written: "Following on the heals of Pollock's dripped line, the 'stain painting' practiced by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, or Jules Olitski or Kenneth Noland, was meant to marry the pictorial mark ever more inextricably to the weft of the canvas ground, making it ever harder to locate the embodied form of any depicted object and ever easier to perform the sublimated reading of the abstract and the optical. Warhol pulls the plug on these aspirations to sublimation by reminding us that there is no form so 'innocent' (or abstract) that it can ever avoid the corruption of a projective interpretation, a 'seeing-in' or a 'seeing as'" (ibid., pp. 7-8).
Warhol's Rorschach paintings, made by pouring black pigment in an abstract configuration on one half of a canvas and then folding the canvas to create a seemingly symmetrical marking, provided Warhol with a simple visual vocabulary with which to explore the cross-polination of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Greenbergian formalism. Recalling the automatic calligraphy of the Surrealists and the individuality of the mark as embraced by the Abstract Expressionists, Warhol's Rorschach paintings reveal an insistence on non-mimemtic, abstract imagery to convey a legible and highly personal subject matter. Rosalind Krauss has written: "Following on the heals of Pollock's dripped line, the 'stain painting' practiced by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, or Jules Olitski or Kenneth Noland, was meant to marry the pictorial mark ever more inextricably to the weft of the canvas ground, making it ever harder to locate the embodied form of any depicted object and ever easier to perform the sublimated reading of the abstract and the optical. Warhol pulls the plug on these aspirations to sublimation by reminding us that there is no form so 'innocent' (or abstract) that it can ever avoid the corruption of a projective interpretation, a 'seeing-in' or a 'seeing as'" (ibid., pp. 7-8).