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Lot Essay
"Your face embodies all that is tender in the world. Your eyes are as dark as the green-blue sea - they draw me irresistibly to you. A painfully soft smile plays on your mouth, as if you wanted to ask me forgiveness for something...Your profile is that of a Madonna - your lips part gently as if in pain. Anxiously I ask if you are feeling sad - but you just whisper, I am in love with you..." (Edward Munch, to Sigurd Høost, cited in R. Stang, Edvard Munch: The Man and the Artist, London 1979, p. 178).
Throughout his career, Warhol deliberately 'looted' some of the most reproduced art works in the art historical canon as subjects of his ceaseless artistic exploration of the effects of endless repetition: Leonardo's Last Supper and the Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna (The Brooch) being the most familiar examples - each of which gained a new and different kind of fame for having received the 'Warhol' treatment.
Warhol was drawn to appropriate Munch in particular because Munch himself often repeated his own imagery, especially when he sold a painting he would rather have kept. The reason for this repetition "...is that we see with different eyes at different times...That is why one subject can be seen in so many ways and that is what makes art so interesting" (Edvard Munch, cited in R. Stang,
Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art, New York 1979, p. 16).
Like Warhol, Munch also rendered the same forms in multiples - in his case in wood block prints, lithographs and etchings. These printed forms were all produced in multiple editions and often in several different media with colour variations. As with Madonna (The Brooch), the source of Warhol's Eva Medocci, he sometimes developed images in prints first which were intended to become paintings later.
The two artists shared an uncannily similar working method, albeit their artistic intents were diametrically opposed: it becomes impossible to identify any one work as the 'source' or original artwork in either of their oeuvres, in particular as both were known to make multiples simultaneously.
In Warhol's practice, this process of reproducing the same image never renders the same work multiple times: we only understand it to be the same from the overall impression made. In reality there are endless variations on the same theme and yet no further revelations of the subject of the image: there are differences in colour, texture, focus, quality of printing and so on, yet these alterations serve to obfuscate the subject rather than reveal anything of their psychological state, the classic preserve of 20th century portraiture. Warhol is turning an iconic work of art by a 20th century master of his lover, represented as Madonna, into a further stereotype, in the process standardising her image - like the Madonna, the subject is made ever more ethereal - a ghostly apparition with an other-wordly smile, nothing to do with the real Eva Mudocci - the only connection with her which Warhol ironically retains is her name in the title.
Eva Mudocci was a famous British violinist (her real name was Evangeline Hope Muddock, but like a number of British musicians at the time she felt that a continental sounding name would be a professional advantage). Munch met her in Paris in 1902 and their relationship lasted for several years. Though he tried repeatedly to paint her, he eventually gave up, completing instead three lithographs, including Madonna, the image Warhol chose to appropriate, no doubt for it's further layering of meaning and increased detachment from the actual sitter.
Eva said of sitting for Munch:
"He wanted to paint a perfect portrait of me, but each time he began an oil painting he destroyed it, because he was not happy with it. He had more success with the lithographs, and the stones that he used were sent up to our room in the Hotel Sans Souci in Berlin. One of these, the so-called Madonna (The Brooch), was accompanied by a note that said 'Here is the stone that fell from my heart' (Eva Mudocci to W. Stabell, cited in W. Stabell, Edvard Munch og Eva Mudocci, Oslo 1973, p. 217).
Throughout his career, Warhol deliberately 'looted' some of the most reproduced art works in the art historical canon as subjects of his ceaseless artistic exploration of the effects of endless repetition: Leonardo's Last Supper and the Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna (The Brooch) being the most familiar examples - each of which gained a new and different kind of fame for having received the 'Warhol' treatment.
Warhol was drawn to appropriate Munch in particular because Munch himself often repeated his own imagery, especially when he sold a painting he would rather have kept. The reason for this repetition "...is that we see with different eyes at different times...That is why one subject can be seen in so many ways and that is what makes art so interesting" (Edvard Munch, cited in R. Stang,
Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art, New York 1979, p. 16).
Like Warhol, Munch also rendered the same forms in multiples - in his case in wood block prints, lithographs and etchings. These printed forms were all produced in multiple editions and often in several different media with colour variations. As with Madonna (The Brooch), the source of Warhol's Eva Medocci, he sometimes developed images in prints first which were intended to become paintings later.
The two artists shared an uncannily similar working method, albeit their artistic intents were diametrically opposed: it becomes impossible to identify any one work as the 'source' or original artwork in either of their oeuvres, in particular as both were known to make multiples simultaneously.
In Warhol's practice, this process of reproducing the same image never renders the same work multiple times: we only understand it to be the same from the overall impression made. In reality there are endless variations on the same theme and yet no further revelations of the subject of the image: there are differences in colour, texture, focus, quality of printing and so on, yet these alterations serve to obfuscate the subject rather than reveal anything of their psychological state, the classic preserve of 20th century portraiture. Warhol is turning an iconic work of art by a 20th century master of his lover, represented as Madonna, into a further stereotype, in the process standardising her image - like the Madonna, the subject is made ever more ethereal - a ghostly apparition with an other-wordly smile, nothing to do with the real Eva Mudocci - the only connection with her which Warhol ironically retains is her name in the title.
Eva Mudocci was a famous British violinist (her real name was Evangeline Hope Muddock, but like a number of British musicians at the time she felt that a continental sounding name would be a professional advantage). Munch met her in Paris in 1902 and their relationship lasted for several years. Though he tried repeatedly to paint her, he eventually gave up, completing instead three lithographs, including Madonna, the image Warhol chose to appropriate, no doubt for it's further layering of meaning and increased detachment from the actual sitter.
Eva said of sitting for Munch:
"He wanted to paint a perfect portrait of me, but each time he began an oil painting he destroyed it, because he was not happy with it. He had more success with the lithographs, and the stones that he used were sent up to our room in the Hotel Sans Souci in Berlin. One of these, the so-called Madonna (The Brooch), was accompanied by a note that said 'Here is the stone that fell from my heart' (Eva Mudocci to W. Stabell, cited in W. Stabell, Edvard Munch og Eva Mudocci, Oslo 1973, p. 217).