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Lot Essay
Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign paintings display the power and allure of money and its symbolism in a way only Andy Warhol could. The artist took a symbol typically thought of as being so commonplace as to almost escape notice altogether, and imbued it with his unique vision, making it strikingly beautiful and unique. Utilizing his screen-printing technique, Warhol produces canvases which shimmer and dazzle, while at the same time the neon-and-candy-colored palette entices.
In these works, Warhol depicts the dollar sign as both lyrical and uniform. Formally elegant, yet ready for us to invest our own hopes and dreams. With these works the iconography of the dollar becomes one of the artist’s most charged and personally resonant images, the ultimate expression of his lifelong love affair with money.
With his Dollar Sign paintings from the early 1980s Warhol returned to using his own drawings as source material, something he had not done since his earliest years as an artist, making these paintings rare works in the artist’s oeuvre. They merge two distinct styles, bringing together the best aspects of both the early Warhol and the late. They possess aspects of the luxurious hand-drawn sketches from early in the artist’s career and they project the ironic vision of Warhol the mature artist, avatar of the Modern and the postmodern, who created some of the most instantly recognizable artworks of the postwar era.
Working with one essential form, Warhol created a series or works allowing for an almost unlimited range of possibilities for the exploration of color, texture and shape. The artist turned a universally recognized symbol into a captivating body of work, one that expresses both the desires and fantasies of the era in which Warhol lived and that projects his own dreams, too. The Dollar Sign paintings are on par with his most powerful and resonant images of wealth, power and celebrity. His paintings held up a mirror to our visions of riches and success, reflecting them back at us. Big-time art is big-time money Warhol once observed, and in these works he zeroes in on the intersection between the value of art and the value of money, locating them in one and the same artwork.
Warhol was famous for exploring the limits of what constitutes art: a movie star’s image, a Campbell’s soup can, or, as here, even a dollar sign. This series, in trademark Warhol fashion, brilliantly tests the limits of what can be considered artistic subject mater. They are a wry and ironic commentary on the power of money in the world of art. The brash, seductive colors and flamboyant line of the paintings in this series could not be a better representation of the glittering lifestyle Warhol would live in the exuberant, money-mad decade of the ‘80s. His late career paintings depicting the icon that is the American dollar were a significant body of work, created just at the outset of what would become—both for the worlds of finance and of art—a wild roller coaster ride of a decade, what were to be the final years of his life, when he was at the height of his fame.
It should come as no surprise that Warhol created a series of paintings depicting the universally recognized symbol of American success. He spent much of his career making art that expressed his fascination with money and the possibilities it could create. “American money is very well-designed, really. I like it better than any other kind of money,” he once quipped (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Any Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, New York, 1975, p. 137). Some of his earliest art works made at the beginning of the 1960s—paintings of dollar bills arranged in all-over grid patterns—were silkscreens, but based on Warhol’s own original drawings and designs. The paintings in this series revisit his earlier strategy. Warhol was unsatisfied with existing images of the dollar, so he rendered the instantly recognizable symbol of American currency himself, putting to work his skills as a draftsman and bringing the handmade into his work process.
At the dawn of what would be the last decade of his life, Warhol revisited the iconography that so fascinated him at the outset of his career as a fine artist. The Dollar Sign series occupies a place in the first rank of the most intriguing work of Warhol’s late period, as he glanced back to his earliest forays in art, whose ideas he would revisit and explore anew in the present series.
In these works, Warhol depicts the dollar sign as both lyrical and uniform. Formally elegant, yet ready for us to invest our own hopes and dreams. With these works the iconography of the dollar becomes one of the artist’s most charged and personally resonant images, the ultimate expression of his lifelong love affair with money.
With his Dollar Sign paintings from the early 1980s Warhol returned to using his own drawings as source material, something he had not done since his earliest years as an artist, making these paintings rare works in the artist’s oeuvre. They merge two distinct styles, bringing together the best aspects of both the early Warhol and the late. They possess aspects of the luxurious hand-drawn sketches from early in the artist’s career and they project the ironic vision of Warhol the mature artist, avatar of the Modern and the postmodern, who created some of the most instantly recognizable artworks of the postwar era.
Working with one essential form, Warhol created a series or works allowing for an almost unlimited range of possibilities for the exploration of color, texture and shape. The artist turned a universally recognized symbol into a captivating body of work, one that expresses both the desires and fantasies of the era in which Warhol lived and that projects his own dreams, too. The Dollar Sign paintings are on par with his most powerful and resonant images of wealth, power and celebrity. His paintings held up a mirror to our visions of riches and success, reflecting them back at us. Big-time art is big-time money Warhol once observed, and in these works he zeroes in on the intersection between the value of art and the value of money, locating them in one and the same artwork.
Warhol was famous for exploring the limits of what constitutes art: a movie star’s image, a Campbell’s soup can, or, as here, even a dollar sign. This series, in trademark Warhol fashion, brilliantly tests the limits of what can be considered artistic subject mater. They are a wry and ironic commentary on the power of money in the world of art. The brash, seductive colors and flamboyant line of the paintings in this series could not be a better representation of the glittering lifestyle Warhol would live in the exuberant, money-mad decade of the ‘80s. His late career paintings depicting the icon that is the American dollar were a significant body of work, created just at the outset of what would become—both for the worlds of finance and of art—a wild roller coaster ride of a decade, what were to be the final years of his life, when he was at the height of his fame.
It should come as no surprise that Warhol created a series of paintings depicting the universally recognized symbol of American success. He spent much of his career making art that expressed his fascination with money and the possibilities it could create. “American money is very well-designed, really. I like it better than any other kind of money,” he once quipped (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Any Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, New York, 1975, p. 137). Some of his earliest art works made at the beginning of the 1960s—paintings of dollar bills arranged in all-over grid patterns—were silkscreens, but based on Warhol’s own original drawings and designs. The paintings in this series revisit his earlier strategy. Warhol was unsatisfied with existing images of the dollar, so he rendered the instantly recognizable symbol of American currency himself, putting to work his skills as a draftsman and bringing the handmade into his work process.
At the dawn of what would be the last decade of his life, Warhol revisited the iconography that so fascinated him at the outset of his career as a fine artist. The Dollar Sign series occupies a place in the first rank of the most intriguing work of Warhol’s late period, as he glanced back to his earliest forays in art, whose ideas he would revisit and explore anew in the present series.