.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘If the notion of glamour still has any validity it must be attached to the Mona Lisa both for the painting’s supremacy as a work of art and for the spell it has cast upon successive generations’ (Stuart Preston, 1963)
In Andy Warhol’s Four Mona Lisas (1978), the most famous face in art appears four times against a vibrant and painterly blue backdrop. Silkscreened twice in full and twice cropped close to the face, her expression shifts with the shadows of each iteration, alive with timeless mystery. The work is one of six versions of this composition Warhol made in 1978, three of which are in major museum collections. Revisiting a series he had made on the occasion of the Mona Lisa’s visit to the United States in 1963, it offers a dazzling reflection on fame, genius and the eternal life of images. The Renaissance masterpiece becomes a Pop icon, restaged by an artist who was by now an icon himself. The present work was previously owned by the collector and cosmetics magnate Carlo Bilotti, a close friend and patron of Warhol and other artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Roy Lichenstein, Salvador Dalí and Niki de Saint Phalle. In 1998-2000, it toured venues across Europe as part of the large-scale retrospective Andy Warhol: A Factory.
The Mona Lisa met the American public early in 1963, having travelled three and a half thousand miles from her home in the Musée du Louvre. The request had been made by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy through the French Minister of Culture André Malraux, and granted as an opportunity to emphasise the bond between the two nations. Nearly two thousand people waited in the cold to witness the unveiling at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Photographers paralleled Jacqueline’s enigmatic smile with the Mona Lisa’s own. The painting moved on a month later to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it received over one million visitors, causing hours-long queues up Fifth Avenue. Among the admirers was Warhol, who soon began a series of silkscreen paintings based on images in the Met’s exhibition brochure. By that time the Mona Lisa had caused a media storm, appearing on magazine covers and in newspapers across the country: she was, Warhol recognised, a bona fide American celebrity.
Warhol was not the first modern artist to riff on the Mona Lisa. She had appeared in paintings by Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich and René Magritte. In his famous parody L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), Marcel Duchamp had adorned a postcard-sized copy of the painting with a moustache and goatee. Conflating high art and low commodity, Duchamp’s subversive appropriations inspired Warhol’s own approach to popular culture. As the most reproduced painting in the world, the Mona Lisa was as familiar an icon as the Campbell’s soup cans or Coca Cola bottles he had already enshrined in his paintings. Warhol understood this as a form of power. Irrespective of the ‘aura’ of the original painting, it was through mass replication that her myth had endured through the twentieth century. Having weathered wartime concealments, a highly publicised theft in 1911 and several attacks of vandalism, she also carried the combination of stardom, beauty and tragedy that drew Warhol to depict the silver-screen sirens Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.
While he would later turn to other Old Masters in his 1984 Details of Renaissance Paintings series, Warhol was especially fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci. Not only the author of some of art history’s most iconic and spellbinding images, Leonardo was a polymath and brilliant courtier who encompassed the spirit of his era, moving among the elite of Renaissance society. King Francis I was said to have been at his bedside when he died. Warhol aspired to similar status in his own time. He owned a large eighteenth-century wooden bust of Leonardo which is visible in numerous images of the Factory from the 1970s onwards, presiding over studio portraits of Warhol with friends including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Bianca Jagger. Before Warhol’s death in 1987, Leonardo would serve again as the muse for his final series: an ambitious two-year project centred around The Last Supper, spanning more than a hundred paintings, silkscreens, prints and works on paper.
Warhol based his 1963 Mona Lisa silkscreens on the three different images of the painting in the Met pamphlet, showing the full portrait, a cropped headshot and a detail of her hands. In the playfully-titled Thirty Are Better Than One (Brant Foundation, Greenwich), he foregrounded the magic of repetition with a 5 x 6 grid of images. He gave another work, Four Mona Lisas, to his friend Henry Geldzahler, the Met’s Curator of Contemporary Art, who later donated it to the museum’s collection. It was this composition that Warhol turned to when he made the present painting in 1978. By that time he himself had entered the pantheon of art history, and he was regarding his body of work in a retrospective mood. The early Mona Lisa works had taken on new shades of meaning. A year after the painting’s American tour, Warhol had gone on to depict Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The moment changed the country forever, and Jackie, who had played so pivotal a role in the Mona Lisa’s story, joined Warhol’s cast of tragic heroines.
Where the 1963 paintings had been silkscreened onto bare linen or canvas, Warhol’s new series showcased the gestural, richly coloured painted backdrops that he had developed in the intervening years. He applied acrylic pigments mixed with clear binder using a sponge mop, creating vivid, textural grounds that interacted dynamically with the overlaid black ink of the silkscreen. The present work, with its swathes of lapis blue and a glow of light pink towards the upper edge, is in remarkable sympathy with the palette of Leonardo’s original painting. The sweeping strokes introduce varied ridges, striations and interruptions to the four silkscreened images, amplifying the notoriously mercurial quality of the Mona Lisa’s expression.
The painterly chiaroscuro of these works prefigured the near-abstract Shadows series that Warhol began to make towards the end of 1978. They also set the stage for his ensuing series of Retrospectives and Reversals, which combined previous motifs in single canvases or reprised them in photographic negative over flickering, luminous painted grounds. Among the Reversals would be further pictures of the Mona Lisa, rendered ghostly in tones of white and sepia. The painting, with its irresistible trappings of legendary beauty, mass appeal and high culture, seems to have haunted Warhol’s imagination like no other. In Four Mona Lisas, she comes to life again, and again, and again.
In Andy Warhol’s Four Mona Lisas (1978), the most famous face in art appears four times against a vibrant and painterly blue backdrop. Silkscreened twice in full and twice cropped close to the face, her expression shifts with the shadows of each iteration, alive with timeless mystery. The work is one of six versions of this composition Warhol made in 1978, three of which are in major museum collections. Revisiting a series he had made on the occasion of the Mona Lisa’s visit to the United States in 1963, it offers a dazzling reflection on fame, genius and the eternal life of images. The Renaissance masterpiece becomes a Pop icon, restaged by an artist who was by now an icon himself. The present work was previously owned by the collector and cosmetics magnate Carlo Bilotti, a close friend and patron of Warhol and other artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Roy Lichenstein, Salvador Dalí and Niki de Saint Phalle. In 1998-2000, it toured venues across Europe as part of the large-scale retrospective Andy Warhol: A Factory.
The Mona Lisa met the American public early in 1963, having travelled three and a half thousand miles from her home in the Musée du Louvre. The request had been made by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy through the French Minister of Culture André Malraux, and granted as an opportunity to emphasise the bond between the two nations. Nearly two thousand people waited in the cold to witness the unveiling at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Photographers paralleled Jacqueline’s enigmatic smile with the Mona Lisa’s own. The painting moved on a month later to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it received over one million visitors, causing hours-long queues up Fifth Avenue. Among the admirers was Warhol, who soon began a series of silkscreen paintings based on images in the Met’s exhibition brochure. By that time the Mona Lisa had caused a media storm, appearing on magazine covers and in newspapers across the country: she was, Warhol recognised, a bona fide American celebrity.
Warhol was not the first modern artist to riff on the Mona Lisa. She had appeared in paintings by Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich and René Magritte. In his famous parody L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), Marcel Duchamp had adorned a postcard-sized copy of the painting with a moustache and goatee. Conflating high art and low commodity, Duchamp’s subversive appropriations inspired Warhol’s own approach to popular culture. As the most reproduced painting in the world, the Mona Lisa was as familiar an icon as the Campbell’s soup cans or Coca Cola bottles he had already enshrined in his paintings. Warhol understood this as a form of power. Irrespective of the ‘aura’ of the original painting, it was through mass replication that her myth had endured through the twentieth century. Having weathered wartime concealments, a highly publicised theft in 1911 and several attacks of vandalism, she also carried the combination of stardom, beauty and tragedy that drew Warhol to depict the silver-screen sirens Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.
While he would later turn to other Old Masters in his 1984 Details of Renaissance Paintings series, Warhol was especially fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci. Not only the author of some of art history’s most iconic and spellbinding images, Leonardo was a polymath and brilliant courtier who encompassed the spirit of his era, moving among the elite of Renaissance society. King Francis I was said to have been at his bedside when he died. Warhol aspired to similar status in his own time. He owned a large eighteenth-century wooden bust of Leonardo which is visible in numerous images of the Factory from the 1970s onwards, presiding over studio portraits of Warhol with friends including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Bianca Jagger. Before Warhol’s death in 1987, Leonardo would serve again as the muse for his final series: an ambitious two-year project centred around The Last Supper, spanning more than a hundred paintings, silkscreens, prints and works on paper.
Warhol based his 1963 Mona Lisa silkscreens on the three different images of the painting in the Met pamphlet, showing the full portrait, a cropped headshot and a detail of her hands. In the playfully-titled Thirty Are Better Than One (Brant Foundation, Greenwich), he foregrounded the magic of repetition with a 5 x 6 grid of images. He gave another work, Four Mona Lisas, to his friend Henry Geldzahler, the Met’s Curator of Contemporary Art, who later donated it to the museum’s collection. It was this composition that Warhol turned to when he made the present painting in 1978. By that time he himself had entered the pantheon of art history, and he was regarding his body of work in a retrospective mood. The early Mona Lisa works had taken on new shades of meaning. A year after the painting’s American tour, Warhol had gone on to depict Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The moment changed the country forever, and Jackie, who had played so pivotal a role in the Mona Lisa’s story, joined Warhol’s cast of tragic heroines.
Where the 1963 paintings had been silkscreened onto bare linen or canvas, Warhol’s new series showcased the gestural, richly coloured painted backdrops that he had developed in the intervening years. He applied acrylic pigments mixed with clear binder using a sponge mop, creating vivid, textural grounds that interacted dynamically with the overlaid black ink of the silkscreen. The present work, with its swathes of lapis blue and a glow of light pink towards the upper edge, is in remarkable sympathy with the palette of Leonardo’s original painting. The sweeping strokes introduce varied ridges, striations and interruptions to the four silkscreened images, amplifying the notoriously mercurial quality of the Mona Lisa’s expression.
The painterly chiaroscuro of these works prefigured the near-abstract Shadows series that Warhol began to make towards the end of 1978. They also set the stage for his ensuing series of Retrospectives and Reversals, which combined previous motifs in single canvases or reprised them in photographic negative over flickering, luminous painted grounds. Among the Reversals would be further pictures of the Mona Lisa, rendered ghostly in tones of white and sepia. The painting, with its irresistible trappings of legendary beauty, mass appeal and high culture, seems to have haunted Warhol’s imagination like no other. In Four Mona Lisas, she comes to life again, and again, and again.