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Lot Essay
In 1984 Andy Warhol began a series of works on canvas and editioned prints based on iconic paintings from the Italian Renaissance. These images included reinterpretations of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Annunciation, Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon, and Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
The present lot, a complete set of Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482), is a quintessentially Warholian take on Botticelli’s beloved and culturally ubiquitous image of the goddess emerging from the sea. As in his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor from the 1960s, Warhol mobilized his entire pop visual language. In the screenprints, he crops the full source image to focus on the face and hair of the subject, surrounds their profile with a flat color background, and exclusively uses his signature neon color palate. As a result, instead of the luminous realism of Botticelli’s painting, Warhol presents Botticelli’s Venus as a pop commodity.
Warhol’s Renaissance series are in a similar vein as many of the editioned sets of screenprints executed in the 1980s. During this decade, Warhol was open to suggestions and found inspiration for portraits beyond Hollywood starlets and socialites. Advertisements, cultural symbols, and art history were among the most prominent sources. This is reflected in the major print series from these years: Ads, Myths and Cowboys and Indians. These series move beyond known figures to images that saturate visual culture, from television to the vaunted museums of Europe.
Warhol’s mining of the art historical cannon for inspiration, as seen in Details of Renaissance Paintings, was not unique, since Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann also enjoyed reinterpreting classic imagery with a Pop lens throughout their careers. This awareness of their own place in the cannon was particularly drenched in satire for the Pop Generation, in the same vein as Marcel Duchamp’s defaced images of Mona Lisa. Reverence for tradition was usurped in favor of image as product.
The present lot, a complete set of Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482), is a quintessentially Warholian take on Botticelli’s beloved and culturally ubiquitous image of the goddess emerging from the sea. As in his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor from the 1960s, Warhol mobilized his entire pop visual language. In the screenprints, he crops the full source image to focus on the face and hair of the subject, surrounds their profile with a flat color background, and exclusively uses his signature neon color palate. As a result, instead of the luminous realism of Botticelli’s painting, Warhol presents Botticelli’s Venus as a pop commodity.
Warhol’s Renaissance series are in a similar vein as many of the editioned sets of screenprints executed in the 1980s. During this decade, Warhol was open to suggestions and found inspiration for portraits beyond Hollywood starlets and socialites. Advertisements, cultural symbols, and art history were among the most prominent sources. This is reflected in the major print series from these years: Ads, Myths and Cowboys and Indians. These series move beyond known figures to images that saturate visual culture, from television to the vaunted museums of Europe.
Warhol’s mining of the art historical cannon for inspiration, as seen in Details of Renaissance Paintings, was not unique, since Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann also enjoyed reinterpreting classic imagery with a Pop lens throughout their careers. This awareness of their own place in the cannon was particularly drenched in satire for the Pop Generation, in the same vein as Marcel Duchamp’s defaced images of Mona Lisa. Reverence for tradition was usurped in favor of image as product.