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拍品專文
Do It Yourself (Violin), one of Andy Warhol’s last hand-painted works and one of a few pivotal early works, announces the singular artist’s triumphant entry into Pop art. The work emerged in the late spring of 1962, the seminal year where Warhol discovered his mature style and when Pop art was first revealed to the New York public. In the work, one in a series of five Do It Yourself paintings—three of which reside in museum collections, the other in the Daros Collection—Warhol investigates the artistic conceits which would become hallmarks of his iconic oeuvre, debuting his singular grasp of Pop aesthetics. As the critic and curator John Coplans observed, this series “marks the first suggestion of Warhol’s finding means to expunge entirely the use of the artist’s hand from his painting,” a revolutionary discovery for the artist which he would continue to develop through his silkscreen technique (“The Early Work of Andy Warhol” in Artforum 8, no. 7, March 1970, p. 53). Do It Yourself (Violin) was acquired months after its creation in October 1962 by Emily and Burton Tremaine, who assembled one of the greatest collections of twentieth-century art. In the company of fourteen other Warhol works in the Tremaine collection obtained that year, including the renowned Marilyn Diptych, now in the collection of Tate, London, and A Boy for Meg, which the Tremaines later donated to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Do It Yourself (Violin) was immediately recognized as one of Andy Warhol’s most innovative and important paintings. “Only an artist as irreverent and ironic as Warhol could have dreamed up the idea of transposing these kitsch, mass-produced images into ‘originals’ for an affluent audience,” the art critic David Bourdon writes of the series, “which prizes them for being among his wittiest and cheekiest artworks” (Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 114).
With Do It Yourself (Violin), Warhol explores notions of originality, the handmade, creativity, and invention in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism and the radical participatory aesthetics conceived by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol here appropriates a "color by numbers" pre-sketched pattern created by Venus Paradise, a colored pencil maker. Warhol adroitly adapts this model, produced for the mass market, into a work of searing originality. Projecting the pattern for a still life including a violin, two apples in a bowl, a knife suspended mid-peel, and a vase onto a canvas, Warhol successfully eliminated any discernable trace of his own artistic hand. Even more innovative was the artist’s decision to leave the majority of the composition uncolored, creating a crisp, deliberate non finito aesthetic while revealing obliquely the source and conceit of the painting. As the scholar Nina Zimmer notes, Warhol “only filled in those fields that he wanted to assign a particular importance and only used those colors he needed to produce an overall compositional balance. Such omissions, as well as the incomplete nature of these pictures, thus constitute the strategies of appropriation that enabled him to undermine the visual concept of the source material and override it with his own pictorial concept” (“Painting by Numbers” in Andy Warhol: The Early Sixties: Paintings and Drawings, 1961-1964, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 2010, p. 73).
Warhol filled in only the most rudimentary forms necessary for the viewer to identify the painting’s apparent subject, leaving the majority of his pictorial field devoid of pigment save for the lingering line of the sketch and the numbers identifying each form’s color. These numbers, applied after the paint fields via the Lestraset process, become a marker of Warhol’s appropriative genius, at once excising Warhol’s culpability in the disegno or invention of the work while simultaneously emphasizing the contrived nature of his appropriation. Warhol here goes beyond even Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing in obliterating the legacies of artistic tradition which had persisted since the Italian Renaissance. Sebastian Egenhofer notes how, “the result of this procedure, Warhol’s oddly evacuated or effaced line, can no longer be understood purely in terms of stylistic critique; the inevitable and paradoxical conclusion is that its lack of expressiveness is an expressive quality. In terms of process engineering, the outline drawing has the function of facilitating the subdivision of the process of production” (“Subjectivity and the Production of Meaning in Warhol’s Early Work” in ibid., p. 39).
The art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh identifies Warhol’s Do It Yourself series as the seminal solution which catapulted the artist from the periphery of New York’s art world to the center. In the early 1960s, Warhol, then known as a commercial artist, observed the success of Johns and Rauschenberg in dismantling the dominance of Abstract Expressionism via their emphasis on mass participation and dismissal of easel painting. Their insights led to the Pop explosion in 1962. The year was notable for influential solo shows by the leading luminaries of the new Pop aesthetic: Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and James Rosenquist held their first exhibitions in January, while Roy Lichtenstein burst onto the scene with a show at Leo Castelli Gallery in February. Warhol’s first encounter with Lichtenstein’s cartoon creations was on a late spring visit to Castelli with his friend Ted Carey, where Ivan Karp, a gallery director, showed him some of Lichtenstein’s works in a back room. This encounter shook Warhol, as he was then independently creating a series of cartoon-inspired paintings similar to those being shown to him. Warhol realized that he was in danger of being left behind as other Pop artists were attaining solo shows in 1962, and the Do It Yourself series was his successful response. As Buchloh writes, Warhol’s “successful debut as an artist in the sphere of fine art… would depend on his capacity to erase from his paintings and drawings more completely than any of his peers (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in particular) the traces of the handmade, of artistry and creativity, of expression and invention” (“Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966” in K. McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 41). In the Do It Yourself series, Buchloh continues, Warhol crystalized his artistic approach: “Warhol’s solution, found in 1962, responded to all of these problems: he isolated, singularized, and centralized representation in the manner of a Duchampian Readymade (and in the manner of Johns’s Flags and Targets), extracted it, thereby, from the tiresome affiliation of collage aesthetics and the nagging accusation of neo-Dada” (ibid., p. 50). This approach, first laid out in the Do It Yourself works, would continue to be refined in Warhol’s proceeding silkscreen series.
Of the works in the series, Do It Yourself (Violin) is unique in Warhol’s addition of crayon, along with his acrylic paint. Warhol devised the series with a sophisticated conceptual unity, with each work in a different state of completion. Do It Yourself (Seascape) (1962, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Collection Marx) is the only work which is more or less completely filled in, while Do It Yourself (Sailboats) (1962, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) lacks color throughout its foreground. Do It Yourself (Landscape) (1962, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Do It Yourself (Flowers) (1962, Daros Collection, Switzerland) have similar degrees of completion, while the present work exhibits the most economical use of pigment. Warhol’s inclusion of crayon here emphasizes the work’s intentionally incomplete state while simultaneously paying homage to his appropriated source—a coloring book intended for colored pencils and crayons. Do It Yourself (Violin) thus attains the most refined state of non finito among the works in the series, recalling masterpieces by ancient artists and Old Masters which became more highly acclaimed by dint of their incomplete status, such as Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna (circa 1494, National Gallery, London), Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi (circa 1482, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), or Albrecht Dürer’s Salvator Mundi (circa 1505, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Even earlier, discussing the legendary unfinished works of the ancient artists Aristides, Nicomachus, and Apelles, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder notes, “they are more admired than those they finished, because in them are seen the artists’ remaining lines and very thoughts” (Natural History, 35.145). Just as works like Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna become invaluable for their ability to reveal the artist’s hidden techniques and preparatory models, Warhol in the present work knowingly winks at both his audience and his appropriated source.
Warhol completed the Do It Yourself series by the end of the summer in 1962. In October, Emily and Burton Tremaine purchased Do It Yourself (Violin), along with their Marilyn Diptych and Close Cover Before Striking (1962, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). The Tremaines were personally introduced to Andy Warhol by Ivan Karp, who had befriended the artist since first meeting him at Leo Castelli and steered potential collectors towards his studio. Emily Tremaine recalls how “we thought he was naïve, a new Douanier Rousseau—how wrong we were. We made several visits to Andy’s studio—Andy was usually playing two stereos simultaneously, one belting out Bach, the other blasting rock n’ roll—and came to think of both Andy and his work as perhaps the most enigmatical and complex of any of the artists we were beginning to know” (quoted in D. Bourdon, op. cit., 1989, p. 86). After this critical introduction, they soon became some of Warhol’s greatest champions and collectors. In 1980, the Tremaines sold Do It Yourself (Violin) to Harold and Hester Dimond. The work has been included in several of the artist’s most significant exhibitions, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 1978 retrospective and Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, before travelling to The Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. The work then ascended into the legendary collection of Si Newhouse, where it has remained since. With an impeccable provenance and exhibition history, Do It Yourself (Violin) is one of Warhol’s most important early works still in private hands.
The only work from its series to ever appear at auction, Do It Yourself (Violin) is a conceptual breakthrough and assertion of artistic intent, standing at a critical juncture where Warhol definitively embraced the democratizing, mechanized logic which would define Pop. By translating a mass-market coloring template into a painting, Warhol crystallized the strategies of appropriation, erasure, and distancing that would inform his mature practice. The work’s early acquisition, distinguished exhibition history, and exceptional provenance further underscore its status as a foundational work signaling the emergence of Warhol’s singular voice within the new visual language of the latter half of the twentieth century.
With Do It Yourself (Violin), Warhol explores notions of originality, the handmade, creativity, and invention in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism and the radical participatory aesthetics conceived by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol here appropriates a "color by numbers" pre-sketched pattern created by Venus Paradise, a colored pencil maker. Warhol adroitly adapts this model, produced for the mass market, into a work of searing originality. Projecting the pattern for a still life including a violin, two apples in a bowl, a knife suspended mid-peel, and a vase onto a canvas, Warhol successfully eliminated any discernable trace of his own artistic hand. Even more innovative was the artist’s decision to leave the majority of the composition uncolored, creating a crisp, deliberate non finito aesthetic while revealing obliquely the source and conceit of the painting. As the scholar Nina Zimmer notes, Warhol “only filled in those fields that he wanted to assign a particular importance and only used those colors he needed to produce an overall compositional balance. Such omissions, as well as the incomplete nature of these pictures, thus constitute the strategies of appropriation that enabled him to undermine the visual concept of the source material and override it with his own pictorial concept” (“Painting by Numbers” in Andy Warhol: The Early Sixties: Paintings and Drawings, 1961-1964, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 2010, p. 73).
Warhol filled in only the most rudimentary forms necessary for the viewer to identify the painting’s apparent subject, leaving the majority of his pictorial field devoid of pigment save for the lingering line of the sketch and the numbers identifying each form’s color. These numbers, applied after the paint fields via the Lestraset process, become a marker of Warhol’s appropriative genius, at once excising Warhol’s culpability in the disegno or invention of the work while simultaneously emphasizing the contrived nature of his appropriation. Warhol here goes beyond even Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing in obliterating the legacies of artistic tradition which had persisted since the Italian Renaissance. Sebastian Egenhofer notes how, “the result of this procedure, Warhol’s oddly evacuated or effaced line, can no longer be understood purely in terms of stylistic critique; the inevitable and paradoxical conclusion is that its lack of expressiveness is an expressive quality. In terms of process engineering, the outline drawing has the function of facilitating the subdivision of the process of production” (“Subjectivity and the Production of Meaning in Warhol’s Early Work” in ibid., p. 39).
The art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh identifies Warhol’s Do It Yourself series as the seminal solution which catapulted the artist from the periphery of New York’s art world to the center. In the early 1960s, Warhol, then known as a commercial artist, observed the success of Johns and Rauschenberg in dismantling the dominance of Abstract Expressionism via their emphasis on mass participation and dismissal of easel painting. Their insights led to the Pop explosion in 1962. The year was notable for influential solo shows by the leading luminaries of the new Pop aesthetic: Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and James Rosenquist held their first exhibitions in January, while Roy Lichtenstein burst onto the scene with a show at Leo Castelli Gallery in February. Warhol’s first encounter with Lichtenstein’s cartoon creations was on a late spring visit to Castelli with his friend Ted Carey, where Ivan Karp, a gallery director, showed him some of Lichtenstein’s works in a back room. This encounter shook Warhol, as he was then independently creating a series of cartoon-inspired paintings similar to those being shown to him. Warhol realized that he was in danger of being left behind as other Pop artists were attaining solo shows in 1962, and the Do It Yourself series was his successful response. As Buchloh writes, Warhol’s “successful debut as an artist in the sphere of fine art… would depend on his capacity to erase from his paintings and drawings more completely than any of his peers (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in particular) the traces of the handmade, of artistry and creativity, of expression and invention” (“Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966” in K. McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 41). In the Do It Yourself series, Buchloh continues, Warhol crystalized his artistic approach: “Warhol’s solution, found in 1962, responded to all of these problems: he isolated, singularized, and centralized representation in the manner of a Duchampian Readymade (and in the manner of Johns’s Flags and Targets), extracted it, thereby, from the tiresome affiliation of collage aesthetics and the nagging accusation of neo-Dada” (ibid., p. 50). This approach, first laid out in the Do It Yourself works, would continue to be refined in Warhol’s proceeding silkscreen series.
Of the works in the series, Do It Yourself (Violin) is unique in Warhol’s addition of crayon, along with his acrylic paint. Warhol devised the series with a sophisticated conceptual unity, with each work in a different state of completion. Do It Yourself (Seascape) (1962, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Collection Marx) is the only work which is more or less completely filled in, while Do It Yourself (Sailboats) (1962, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) lacks color throughout its foreground. Do It Yourself (Landscape) (1962, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Do It Yourself (Flowers) (1962, Daros Collection, Switzerland) have similar degrees of completion, while the present work exhibits the most economical use of pigment. Warhol’s inclusion of crayon here emphasizes the work’s intentionally incomplete state while simultaneously paying homage to his appropriated source—a coloring book intended for colored pencils and crayons. Do It Yourself (Violin) thus attains the most refined state of non finito among the works in the series, recalling masterpieces by ancient artists and Old Masters which became more highly acclaimed by dint of their incomplete status, such as Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna (circa 1494, National Gallery, London), Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi (circa 1482, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), or Albrecht Dürer’s Salvator Mundi (circa 1505, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Even earlier, discussing the legendary unfinished works of the ancient artists Aristides, Nicomachus, and Apelles, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder notes, “they are more admired than those they finished, because in them are seen the artists’ remaining lines and very thoughts” (Natural History, 35.145). Just as works like Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna become invaluable for their ability to reveal the artist’s hidden techniques and preparatory models, Warhol in the present work knowingly winks at both his audience and his appropriated source.
Warhol completed the Do It Yourself series by the end of the summer in 1962. In October, Emily and Burton Tremaine purchased Do It Yourself (Violin), along with their Marilyn Diptych and Close Cover Before Striking (1962, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). The Tremaines were personally introduced to Andy Warhol by Ivan Karp, who had befriended the artist since first meeting him at Leo Castelli and steered potential collectors towards his studio. Emily Tremaine recalls how “we thought he was naïve, a new Douanier Rousseau—how wrong we were. We made several visits to Andy’s studio—Andy was usually playing two stereos simultaneously, one belting out Bach, the other blasting rock n’ roll—and came to think of both Andy and his work as perhaps the most enigmatical and complex of any of the artists we were beginning to know” (quoted in D. Bourdon, op. cit., 1989, p. 86). After this critical introduction, they soon became some of Warhol’s greatest champions and collectors. In 1980, the Tremaines sold Do It Yourself (Violin) to Harold and Hester Dimond. The work has been included in several of the artist’s most significant exhibitions, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 1978 retrospective and Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, before travelling to The Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. The work then ascended into the legendary collection of Si Newhouse, where it has remained since. With an impeccable provenance and exhibition history, Do It Yourself (Violin) is one of Warhol’s most important early works still in private hands.
The only work from its series to ever appear at auction, Do It Yourself (Violin) is a conceptual breakthrough and assertion of artistic intent, standing at a critical juncture where Warhol definitively embraced the democratizing, mechanized logic which would define Pop. By translating a mass-market coloring template into a painting, Warhol crystallized the strategies of appropriation, erasure, and distancing that would inform his mature practice. The work’s early acquisition, distinguished exhibition history, and exceptional provenance further underscore its status as a foundational work signaling the emergence of Warhol’s singular voice within the new visual language of the latter half of the twentieth century.
