Andy Warhol

Estate of the Artist
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
Private Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

London, Gagosian Gallery, Pop Art Is..., September - November 2007, p. 39, illustrated in color

Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven, 1996, no. 13, illustrated
Jose Maria Faerna, ed., Andy Warhol, New York, 1997, pl. 27, illustrated
Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds. The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I, Paintings and Sculpture 1961 - 1963, New York, 2002, cat. no. 379, p. 347, illustrated in color

This painting is in fair condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a metal strip frame.
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Visual aesthetics, rigorous use of composition and astute choice of subject matter come together in Andy Warhol's Tunafish Disaster from 1963, creating a work of power, beauty and tragedy.  After decades of modernist abstraction, Pop Art re-established representation and found imagery to painting, reflecting the contemporary world in which it thrived via electronic and print media. Tunafish Disaster is an outstanding example of the artist's Death and Disaster series that reveals Warhol's pre-occupation with the contradictions inherent in public and private despair.  This stunning silver canvas brilliantly illuminates how the agents of mass media, replication and multiplication, undermine the significance of their subjects.  Having both tragically died from food poisoning after eating contaminated tins of tuna, the previously anonymous Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown were thrown into the public spotlight, providing Warhol with the perfect subject to critique the relationship between death and celebrity in his infamous silkscreen. Having been created on a roll of silver-painted canvas on the floor of Warhol's Firehouse studio at East 87^th street, this work will forever symbolize the crucial moment when formative experiments matured into sensational masterpieces. 

 

In the 1960s, for the first time in art history, items such as advertisements, movie stills, magazines and newspaper photographs played a dominant role in artists' creative thinking.  Often the same photograph or video clip was shown repeatedly in periodicals and on television screens, inuring the public to certain images no matter how potent their content.  The irony of this appealed to Warhol, who subtly used this brand of imagery to infuse raw emotion into his subject matter.  The source for the Tunafish Disaster series came from a page of the April 1, 1963 edition of Newsweek, which detailed the epitome of what Walter Hopps called the "unpredictable choreography of death" amongst the "banality of everyday disasters." (Walter Hopps in Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: 'Death and Disasters', 1988, p. 9)  From the article, Warhol created two screens: one including both the imagery and all the text; and one as a detail of the tuna can and the two subjects at the center of the page.  Using the latter, he created the present work, which does not include the main body of text but narrates the story much more visually through the images and their captions alone.

 

The Death and Disaster series may have at first appeared to be a startling choice of subject for the new star of Pop Art and the painter of mundane consumer products such as the Campbell's Soup Can.  Yet, over the intervening decades, this body of work has been recognized as his most important and complex.  Warhol had a striking fascination with death and, overtly or subtly, the theme is a vein that runs through a large portion of his overall output – from celebrity paintings to self-portrait to car crashes. The Deaths and Disasters were both self-inflicted, and socially determined.  They do not appear at all sentimental; capturing the choreography of death rather than the emotional import.  The raw humanism of the images of suicides, catastrophes, tragic car accidents and capital punishment is juxtaposed against Warhol's desire to be detached and machine-like, revealing the contradictory impulse that led him to produce such powerful and moving works of art.  Warhol's iconoclastic adoption of screen printing in painting fully engaged the screen-print's facility with photography and its potential for repetition.  Screen-printing allowed Warhol to distance himself from art-making and to simulate mechanical processes, inventing radical printing methods that, ironically, became his personal signature.

 

At times Warhol chose to cloak images from the Death and Disaster series in repeated patterns. Within his detached stance, the artist's actual intent was not to render the scene as anonymous but to point out the particularities and unique tragedy of an individual death.  In a 1963 interview, Warhol described his attraction to his source material.  "When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect. ...and I thought people should think about them some time. ...It's not that I feel sorry for them, it's just that people go by and it doesn't really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered." (Gene Swenson, "What is Pop Art?", Artnews 62, November 1963, pp. 60-61)  Warhol was disturbed by the media's potential to manipulate but simultaneously he celebrated the power of the iconic.

 

Tunafish Disaster encapsulates portraiture as biography and it acts as a memorial to the anonymous victims by eulogizing their story to the realm of high art. Conceptually it summarizes every thematic element of the Death and Disasters and manifests the logical bridge with Warhol's portraits of celebrities who were similarly touched by tragedy.  It further provides the subject for an extraordinarily neat progression from the artist's celebrated Campbell Soup Can, Coca Cola Bottle and Martinson Coffee Can paintings of the previous year to the Death and Disaster canon – where once products were champions of consumerist advertising, here the tins of tuna are transformed from trophies of branding to the agents of death and, in a bizarre turn of fate, the facilitators of celebrity.