Andy Warhol

“Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall” (David Bowie, Andy Warhol, from the album Hunky Dory 1972)

Andy Warhol was the master of appropriation and nowhere is his genius in this field more clearly seen than in the series Art from Art and in The Scream in particular. Just as he had turned Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Electric Chairs and a whole galaxy of 1970s and 1980s celebrities into products of the Warhol machine, so he took the stars of world art and made them his own creations. Through the simple methods of exchanging Munch`s muted, melancholy tones for waves of bright psychedelic intensity and the use of his trademark silkscreen, Warhol transformed the most famous expressionist painting into a signature Warhol. It is a piece of postmodernist brilliance. Warhol in this work converts a painting whose raison d´etre lay in its subjectivity and profundity into an object freed from the subjective, turning the viewer’s attention from the soul of the work to its surface.

Edvard Munch painted four versions of The Scream (Shrik in his native Norwegian) in 1893. Forming part of his Frieze of Life series, Munch hoped and envisaged that his work would become a secular altarpiece. “One should no longer paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. They must be living individuals who feel, suffer, love, and breathe. I will paint a series of such pictures. People should understand the sacred nature thereof, and take off their hats before them as though they were in church.” (Munch in a diary entry, cited in: Christian Gehrer Echoes of the Scream, exhibition catalogue, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Munch Museum, 2001, p. 14) An expression of the “great, ceaseless scream passing through nature” (ibid., p. 15), The Scream is an existential cry, an expression of the loneliness of man and of the new human condition in the twentieth century.

Warhol purposefully ignores this emotional content in the work – just as he had in his Race Riots, Electric Chairs, and Death and Disasters series – and concentrates instead on the work as an icon of popular culture. Warhol´s concern lies not with the painting itself but with the contemporary experience of it. Just as Duchamp and Warhol himself had done with Mona Lisa, he descalizes the painting, both recognising the way The Scream was in a sense as commercial an object as Mickey Mouse and encouraging that process. We may presume that Warhol would have enjoyed the fact that The Scream now appears not just on tee shirts and coffee mugs but is also available in inflatable doll form and has even starred more than once in The Simpsons.  By reproducing The Scream, Warhol both underlines the iconic status of the work and shows how it can also be a mass-produced consumer product – a process unwittingly begun by Munch when he created a lithograph of the work in 1895.

Warhol produced only five canvas versions of The Scream (an unusually small number for him) as part of a series of silkscreen prints which included a number of other Munch works including Eva Mudocci, Self-portrait with Skeleton Arm and Madonna. Warhol had started to use the work of other artists as subjects at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s after a relatively barren period in his artistic life. In 1979 he began his Reversals and Retrospective series in which he re-examined the more famous aspects of his own body of work. This series featured the re-appearance of Warhol´s reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa which in turn led to Warhol’s studies of the works of other masters in the Art from Art series. Just as Picasso spent much of his later years analysing the work of predecessors he admired, so Warhol explored the work of Leonardo, Cranach, Uccello, Raphael, de Chrico and Munch. By simply reproducing their work without comment, Warhol not only made a wonderful postmodern gesture, he could also pay subtle tribute to the works of other masters without compromising his famous ambition - to be a machine.

In the present work, the economy of line married to the strong, vibrant colours creates a powerful image. The striking orange in particular hits the retina with force.  At the same time, it is also a somewhat humorous image. Painted flesh-pink the central character appears to be not so much a man in the throes of an existential crisis as someone camping it up. Together they create a signature Warhol, another amazing product of the Warhol factory given up to the Pantheon of mass culture images. Thus, just as with a Warhol Marilyn, one recognises that it is an “Andy Warhol” at least as much as one recognises Marilyn Monroe herself, so with this extremely rare work one sees the trademark style of Warhol as much as one spots the original masterpiece. As John Cage pointed out, “Warhol has shown through repitition that there is no repetition in art.” (cited in: Jörg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Art from Art, Cologne 1994, p. 9)