拍品專文
From April to June 1982, the year in which Warhol executed the present work, the New York Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective of the work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Warhol took his inspiration for Furniture in the Valley from the painting of the same name by the italian artist (fig. 2).
Warhol's celebrated appropriation of the imagery of other artists' work is well known, from as early as the Mona Lisas of the 1960s to his interpretation of Edvard Munch's The Scream in 1984. The MOMA exhibition was to have a profound influence upon him:
"Warhol's canny selections from the data bank of art history also reflected, like Salle's borrowings from Yasuo Kuniyoshi or Reginald Marsh, the revisionist thrust of a postmodernist view of twentieth-century art that would no longer accept the party lines still held in the sixties. Nothing could demonstrate this more acutely that his appropriation of imagery from Giorgio de Chirico in 1982, in exactly the year that the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective offered the canonic, truncated version of the old master's art, which presumably ended in decades of shame with endlessly diluted replications of his early, epoch-making masterpieces. But Warhol translated the de Chirico story into something appropriate to himself and to the reversals of taste of the last decade, which...began to value precisely those aspects of layered memory and replication so conspicuous in the artist's paraphrases and self-counterfeits of his own glorious, but remote, historical past" (Robert Rosenblum, 'Warhol as Art History', Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh.cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 33).
Warhol found in de Chirico an artist whose views on the replication of imagery were akin to his own. According to Claudio Bruni Sakraischik "it all began on the tenth of March 1924, when Giorgio de Chirico wrote to Madame Breton in answer to her request to buy The Sacred Fish and Disquieting Muses that he had already sold: '...if you wish an exact replica of these two paintings, I can do them for you for one thousand lira each. These replicas will have no faults other than having been executed in a more beautiful medium and with a more knowledgeable technique'. With these few words De Chirico denied the significance in his work of the concept of non-repeatable uniqueness, foreseeing the present pragmatic consumerism first expressed in the art world of the 1960s with Pop Art, which culminated in the 70s and 80s with the movements of conceptual art and new painting...[For Andy Warhol] the work of art, disseminated by the thousands of reproductions executed at an industrial level, has now penetrated daily life, becoming just as familiar as any industrial product for mass consumption. Television, magazines, and posters have put works of art on the same level as any other object of common use, and Warhol, more than any other, has understood the compromise between art and consumerism...'Everybody looks alike and reacts in the same way, every day that passes that is more so. I think everybody should be a machine...Pop Art means liking things... Liking things is being a machine...because you do the same thing every time...The reason I am painting this way is that I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do'. With these words, Andy Warhol gives an exact definition of his art and of the world that surrounds him. He introduces the idea of multiples and the concept of the series which involve not only the work of art but man and all of humanity" (Cladio Bruni Sakraischik, 'Warhol Salutes De Chirico', New York 1985, op.cit.,, pp. 6-7).
Warhol's celebrated appropriation of the imagery of other artists' work is well known, from as early as the Mona Lisas of the 1960s to his interpretation of Edvard Munch's The Scream in 1984. The MOMA exhibition was to have a profound influence upon him:
"Warhol's canny selections from the data bank of art history also reflected, like Salle's borrowings from Yasuo Kuniyoshi or Reginald Marsh, the revisionist thrust of a postmodernist view of twentieth-century art that would no longer accept the party lines still held in the sixties. Nothing could demonstrate this more acutely that his appropriation of imagery from Giorgio de Chirico in 1982, in exactly the year that the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective offered the canonic, truncated version of the old master's art, which presumably ended in decades of shame with endlessly diluted replications of his early, epoch-making masterpieces. But Warhol translated the de Chirico story into something appropriate to himself and to the reversals of taste of the last decade, which...began to value precisely those aspects of layered memory and replication so conspicuous in the artist's paraphrases and self-counterfeits of his own glorious, but remote, historical past" (Robert Rosenblum, 'Warhol as Art History', Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh.cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 33).
Warhol found in de Chirico an artist whose views on the replication of imagery were akin to his own. According to Claudio Bruni Sakraischik "it all began on the tenth of March 1924, when Giorgio de Chirico wrote to Madame Breton in answer to her request to buy The Sacred Fish and Disquieting Muses that he had already sold: '...if you wish an exact replica of these two paintings, I can do them for you for one thousand lira each. These replicas will have no faults other than having been executed in a more beautiful medium and with a more knowledgeable technique'. With these few words De Chirico denied the significance in his work of the concept of non-repeatable uniqueness, foreseeing the present pragmatic consumerism first expressed in the art world of the 1960s with Pop Art, which culminated in the 70s and 80s with the movements of conceptual art and new painting...[For Andy Warhol] the work of art, disseminated by the thousands of reproductions executed at an industrial level, has now penetrated daily life, becoming just as familiar as any industrial product for mass consumption. Television, magazines, and posters have put works of art on the same level as any other object of common use, and Warhol, more than any other, has understood the compromise between art and consumerism...'Everybody looks alike and reacts in the same way, every day that passes that is more so. I think everybody should be a machine...Pop Art means liking things... Liking things is being a machine...because you do the same thing every time...The reason I am painting this way is that I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do'. With these words, Andy Warhol gives an exact definition of his art and of the world that surrounds him. He introduces the idea of multiples and the concept of the series which involve not only the work of art but man and all of humanity" (Cladio Bruni Sakraischik, 'Warhol Salutes De Chirico', New York 1985, op.cit.,, pp. 6-7).