Andy Warhol

Warhol was at the height of his creative powers during the autumn of 1964 as he worked in earnest towards his inaugural show with Leo Castelli in November. Like he had at Ferus in 1962 with his Campbell’s Soup and Elvis series, and at Sonnabend, Paris with the ‘Death and Disaster’ paintings, Warhol conceived a similar wholly new, single-theme exhibition which would consume the gallery space, this time with Flowers. Creating a multitude of canvases in variety of sizes and colour combinations, Warhol filled the gallery in a kaleidoscope of lush Day-Glo colour, that was described by David Bourdon, the art critic of the Village Voice at the time, as: “…cut-out gouaches by Matisse seta adrift on Monet’s lily-pond.” (in: Village Voice, 3 December 1964, p. 11) The success of the sell out exhibition was instantaneous, so much so that the Flowers almost overnight became synonymous with the Pop movement. The present work was the very first work to sell, and was described by Ivan Karp who had been working very closely with Warhol in setting up the Castelli show, as “…the most buoyant and appealing of the entire group.”

Along with his Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyns, Warhol’s Flowers rank among the timeless icons of twentieth-century art. Just as it had done for his series of dollar bills and soup cans, supposedly the idea to make flowers the subject of a major series came not from Warhol but from a friend – in this case Henry Geldzahler, then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Warhol found the source image for his Flower series in a photograph by Patricia Caulfield of seven hibiscus blossoms presented as a fold-out in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. The seriality of the image - intended to illustrate the varying visual effect of different exposure times and filter settings – no doubt held immediate charm for him as he set about transforming it by rotating one of the flowers 180 degrees and cropping the composition into its present square format. Warhol chose the square because of the denial of a fixed upright and the resultant range of orientations that it affords. “I like painting on a square,” he explained, “because you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square.”(cited in: David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 191) The Castelli installation exploited this to its full visual impact, arranging the canvases like tesserae on the walls to elicit subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases, the amorphous curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialising the rectilinear grid-like structure created by the gaps between the canvases.

Between June and September 1964 Warhol’s studio – the Factory – became a production line for Flower paintings of different sizes. The twenty four inch flowers were produced towards the end of this period and reflect the degree to which he had honed and refined the screen-printing process throughout this crucial phase of his artistic development. It was in these months that he essentially made this revolutionary process his own. He was attracted by the affinity of the silkscreen with the mass-media printing aesthetic of consumer culture and by its anonymous, luxuriously slick facture which annulled the individual hand of the artist. By removing himself from the creative equation, Warhol sought to communicate more directly with the established popular currency that blended high and low culture imagery.

Each Flower canvas was created in three distinct stages: firstly, the forms of the flowers were stencilled, masked and the coloured paints of the petals applied by hand onto the primed canvas; once dry, the flowers were masked from the inside and the green acrylic of the surrounding ground was applied with a wide brush in broad strokes, leaving scant traces of the artist’s brush; finally the screen-print image was applied over the two underlayers to complete the image.

In choosing to the disarmingly innocuous motif of tiny hibiscus flowers, Warhol was wilfully engaging with an established canon of still-life painting stretching back centuries: “With the Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my Flower period! Like Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers, the genre.” (Gerard Malanga cited in: A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York 2003, p. 74).Warhol’s updated interpretation of this age-old motif, however, is consciously banal and synthetic. In the first instance he rejects the intricate and hierarchical compositions of the Dutch still-life tradition in favour of an overhead perspective which banishes the horizon and flattens and distorts the shape of each petal. Secondly, the complex colour harmonies of Monet’s water lilies, say, are abolished in favour of planar zones of flat colour. Throughout the series, Warhol chose synthetic, unnatural colours whose artificial hues belied their manufactured plasticity. In the twenty four inch Flowers, and with the present work a case in point, he began to use fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic paints to further enhance the artificiality of the image.

The Flower paintings are the most abstract works that Warhol produced in the 1960s. As was his usual practice, when converting the original colour source photograph into a two tone screen, he radically heightened the contrast so that in the registration of the image on canvas, the minute details are lost and the forms become increasingly ambiguous. After the Death and Disaster series of 1962-1963 – which depicted sensational images of electric chairs, suicides and horrendous car crashes – the motif of four brightly blooming hibiscus flowers was almost anodyne, a palliative to the horror an violence of previous imagery. However despite its apparent decorative quality, which doubtless appealed to Warhol in his program to make a truly popular art form, the motif is laced with the morbidity that permeates his entire oeuvre. Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, the motif of the flourishing hibiscus serves as a metaphor for the fleeting transience of celebrity – the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer’s gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as an allegory for the frailty and fragility of life.