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Lot Essay
Occupying a singular space in the artist’s vaunted oeuvre, Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings demonstrate his boundless creativity and endless capacity for radical reinvention. The series was the first since Warhol’s early career to be produced without a photographic element. The present work, one of only three diptychs in the series, is a revelation of Warhol’s bold reimagining of abstraction, offering both formal innovation and astonishing beauty. Upon first sight, the series’ formidable presence utterly stunned the esteemed art historian Benjamin Buchloh: “seeing the Oxidation paintings for the first time at documenta 7... gave me one of the rare, and increasingly impossible experiences that one searches for” (B. Buchloh, “A Primer of Urochrome Painting,” in Andy Warhol: The Late Work, exh. cat., Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, 2004, p. 97). Celebrating Warhol’s fascination with abstraction, steeped in the visual iconography of the Byzantine Catholic church of Warhol’s youth, and referencing New York queer nightlife scene and the colorful characters flowing into and out of his Factory studio, Oxidation Painting combines the disparate aspects of Warhol’s famously oblique personality into a rare, reflective masterpiece.
Oxidation Painting expands across two canvases coated in a metallic, bronze-toned paint. Splotches, drops, spills, and pools of varying alchemical stains scatter organically across the canvas surface, creating vivid biomorphic forms complimenting the copper background. The left canvas is almost wholly absorbed by a large, ovular form of darker olive greens and blacks which spread out slowly across the picture plane, gradually giving way to lighter shades dotted with white. The right canvas retains more glittering ground, stains only occasionally interrupting the shimmering surface in more methodical drops and splatters. The work is a riotous display of the artist’s technical achievement in creating a wide range of chemical effects with intricate shifts of color and textural contrasts.
Warhol devised novel methods and media for his Oxidation works. He first mixed copper and copper alloy powders with paint, layering the product onto stretched canvases. He and his assistants then applied urine via various mechanisms onto the wet paint, leaving the urine to react chemically with the metallic pigments, achieving the acid green forms which populate the composition. Warhol experimented widely with both the chemical process and the delivery mechanism, consuming different vitamin supplements to subtly alter the urine’s effect and exploring different methods of application—urinating directly on the canvas and collecting urine in containers to distribute in concentrated drips or pours. Through this innovative process, Warhol created a work of optically fascinating art without any marks of the painterly gesture. While literally absorbing the artist, Oxidation Painting avoids the appearance of the artist’s touch, achieving a result eagerly sought after by the Abstract Expressionists.
The work resembles Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in both method and result—Warhol’s collaborator Bob Colacello reports him noting “it’s a parody of Jackson Pollock” (A. Warhol, quoted in N. Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Paintings 1976-1978, Vol. 5B, New York, 2018, p. 113). Working with the canvas horizontal on the ground, Warhol challenged Pollock’s status as the preeminent artist of the 20th century. With the Oxidation series, Warhol reasserted himself at the art world’s vanguard after a decade spent making silkscreen portraits critically derided as society portraits. The art historian Rosalind Krauss observed how Warhol decoded Pollock’s “liquid gesture” with his Oxidation paintings while employing his signature Pop art aesthetic. “For Warhol, the Oxidation paintings were simply once again motifs that connected high and low culture—action painting and the world of the baths and their golden showers—along the vector of notoriety or ‘fame’” (R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA, 1993 p. 276).
While avant-garde in method and material, Oxidation Painting contains several historical referents. Employing acid on copper has a long tradition in art history, with Old Masters including Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt using etching—lines incised by acid on copper plate—for many of their graphic masterpieces. The urine was only effective while the copper paint was still wet, requiring Warhol to work rapidly. His wet-on-wet process resembles the buon fresco technique utilized by Michelangelo and Raphael in their famous Vatican paintings, all three artists having to rapidly make irreversible decisions before their ground hardened. Oxidation Painting also enacts a thoroughly traditional form, the diptych, which was widely used through the Middle Ages and Renaissance for religious altarpieces. The work’s copper ground similarly recalls altarpieces, resembling the gold ground icons which populate the Byzantine Catholic Church Warhol attended as a child. The process was simultaneously thoroughly contemporary, operating in parallel with New York’s progressive social scene and situated within the Happening and performance-based aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s. Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone recalls the Oxidations as “almost a sort of performance. Like an Yves Klein kind of thing; with women rolling on the canvas” (R. Cutrone, quoted in N. Printz, op. cit., p. 137).
The present work was included in the first public exhibition of the Oxidation paintings in 1978 at Ace Gallery’s booth for the FIAC art fair in Paris. The works were an immediate revelation, with Art International noting how their “bitter beauty and precise bite are striking” (quoted in N. Printz, op. cit., p. 129). Oxidation Painting represents a watershed moment in Warhol’s career, grappling with the art historical tradition and Pollock’s looming legacy while once again revolutionizing the vanguard. Canonically important, the works also provide a tantalizing glimpse into the artist’s internal psyche. “They are seriously beautiful,” Roberta Smith surmised of the Oxidation paintings, providing “another glimpse into the artist’s soul, with its attendant, quite brilliant soullessness” (R. Smith, “Art,” New York Times, November 21, 1986, p. C28).
Oxidation Painting expands across two canvases coated in a metallic, bronze-toned paint. Splotches, drops, spills, and pools of varying alchemical stains scatter organically across the canvas surface, creating vivid biomorphic forms complimenting the copper background. The left canvas is almost wholly absorbed by a large, ovular form of darker olive greens and blacks which spread out slowly across the picture plane, gradually giving way to lighter shades dotted with white. The right canvas retains more glittering ground, stains only occasionally interrupting the shimmering surface in more methodical drops and splatters. The work is a riotous display of the artist’s technical achievement in creating a wide range of chemical effects with intricate shifts of color and textural contrasts.
Warhol devised novel methods and media for his Oxidation works. He first mixed copper and copper alloy powders with paint, layering the product onto stretched canvases. He and his assistants then applied urine via various mechanisms onto the wet paint, leaving the urine to react chemically with the metallic pigments, achieving the acid green forms which populate the composition. Warhol experimented widely with both the chemical process and the delivery mechanism, consuming different vitamin supplements to subtly alter the urine’s effect and exploring different methods of application—urinating directly on the canvas and collecting urine in containers to distribute in concentrated drips or pours. Through this innovative process, Warhol created a work of optically fascinating art without any marks of the painterly gesture. While literally absorbing the artist, Oxidation Painting avoids the appearance of the artist’s touch, achieving a result eagerly sought after by the Abstract Expressionists.
The work resembles Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in both method and result—Warhol’s collaborator Bob Colacello reports him noting “it’s a parody of Jackson Pollock” (A. Warhol, quoted in N. Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Paintings 1976-1978, Vol. 5B, New York, 2018, p. 113). Working with the canvas horizontal on the ground, Warhol challenged Pollock’s status as the preeminent artist of the 20th century. With the Oxidation series, Warhol reasserted himself at the art world’s vanguard after a decade spent making silkscreen portraits critically derided as society portraits. The art historian Rosalind Krauss observed how Warhol decoded Pollock’s “liquid gesture” with his Oxidation paintings while employing his signature Pop art aesthetic. “For Warhol, the Oxidation paintings were simply once again motifs that connected high and low culture—action painting and the world of the baths and their golden showers—along the vector of notoriety or ‘fame’” (R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA, 1993 p. 276).
While avant-garde in method and material, Oxidation Painting contains several historical referents. Employing acid on copper has a long tradition in art history, with Old Masters including Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt using etching—lines incised by acid on copper plate—for many of their graphic masterpieces. The urine was only effective while the copper paint was still wet, requiring Warhol to work rapidly. His wet-on-wet process resembles the buon fresco technique utilized by Michelangelo and Raphael in their famous Vatican paintings, all three artists having to rapidly make irreversible decisions before their ground hardened. Oxidation Painting also enacts a thoroughly traditional form, the diptych, which was widely used through the Middle Ages and Renaissance for religious altarpieces. The work’s copper ground similarly recalls altarpieces, resembling the gold ground icons which populate the Byzantine Catholic Church Warhol attended as a child. The process was simultaneously thoroughly contemporary, operating in parallel with New York’s progressive social scene and situated within the Happening and performance-based aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s. Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone recalls the Oxidations as “almost a sort of performance. Like an Yves Klein kind of thing; with women rolling on the canvas” (R. Cutrone, quoted in N. Printz, op. cit., p. 137).
The present work was included in the first public exhibition of the Oxidation paintings in 1978 at Ace Gallery’s booth for the FIAC art fair in Paris. The works were an immediate revelation, with Art International noting how their “bitter beauty and precise bite are striking” (quoted in N. Printz, op. cit., p. 129). Oxidation Painting represents a watershed moment in Warhol’s career, grappling with the art historical tradition and Pollock’s looming legacy while once again revolutionizing the vanguard. Canonically important, the works also provide a tantalizing glimpse into the artist’s internal psyche. “They are seriously beautiful,” Roberta Smith surmised of the Oxidation paintings, providing “another glimpse into the artist’s soul, with its attendant, quite brilliant soullessness” (R. Smith, “Art,” New York Times, November 21, 1986, p. C28).