Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Rick Librizzi, New York
Sale: Christie's, London, 1 July 1975, lot 105
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 5 April 1978, lot 206
Sale: Christie's, New York, 16 May 1980, lot 77
Thomas Ammann, Zurich
Galeria La Maquina Espagñola, Madrid
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1990

Salzburg, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Andy Warhol: Works 1962 - 1986, 1987, no. 6, illustrated in colour

George Frei and  Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Volume 2A, 1964-1969, New York 2004, p. 316, no. 1373, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in good condition. There is very light rubbing to all four edges with a few associated paint losses in places. There is a small area of thin and stable craquelure to the centre of the left edge. Close inspection reveals a very small spot of paint loss to the bottom right flower and another to the top right flower. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a few spots of retouching along the edges.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

 

Alluringly rendered in saturated deep blue tones, the present work is one of only two 24-inch Flowers created in 1964 to forgo Warhol's default green background and is the only black and blue composition recorded. Most likely executed between October and November of 1964, it was one of the roughly eighty 24-inch canvases produced by Warhol specifically for his first exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in late November. This event premiered the Flowers series and cemented Warhol's relationship with the gallery that represented Pop icons like Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. In the unique choice of colour, Flowers evinces the process of experimentation wherein Warhol pioneered and honed his craft, making revolutionary use of screen printing and establishing his Factory's hyper-productive parody of industrial mass culture. Wishing to formally communicate the single-minded pursuit of speed, the vast majority of Flowers came to exhibit only one or two colours, playfully imitating the banal look of popular 1960s textiles.

In keeping with Pop's cannibalistic consumption of popular imagery, Flowers is derived from a photograph of seven hibiscus blossoms, appropriated by Warhol from the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine. He cropped out three flowers and rotated the remaining four for a tighter composition. The image illustrated an article about different Kodak colour processors, which contained a glossy fold-out featuring the same photograph, taken by executive editor Patricia Caulfield, repeated to show colour variations corresponding to different chemical processes. This ready-made, serial format undoubtedly captured Warhol's attention. The Flowers' instant commercial success and canonisation as Pop icon, however, politicised Warhol's unlicensed use of Caulfield's photo. In a landmark case for Appropriation Art, Caulfield successfully sued Warhol in 1966, settling privately. This event drove Warhol to develop his photographic skills and produce his own source images, enhancing the importance of social connections to his art, but diminishing the subversive, appropriative early-Pop edge present in Flowers. In homage to Warhol's powerful, sometimes roguish interventions into mass visual culture, Elaine Sturtevant mimicked his processes, borrowing the Flowers screens to create derivative works that she exhibited in 1965. Warhol was delighted; years later, bombarded by questions about his artistic process, Warhol answered: "I don't know. Ask Elaine" (the artist cited in: Alexander Tolnay and Elaine Sturtevant, Sturtevant: Shifting Mental Structures, Ostfildern-Ruit 2002, p.11).

The idea to devote a major series to flowers was suggested by Henry Geldzahler, then assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In part, Warhol was consciously engaging with the canon of still-life painting: "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: David Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York 2003, p. 74). Warhol, however, dispensed with the hierarchical composition and meticulous tonal variation typical of the motif, favouring synthetic zones of flat colour. In this respect, Warhol's Flowers are best compared with Matisse's gouaches découpés (paper collages) of the 1940s. Once asked what he desired from life, Warhol answered: "I want to be like Matisse" (the artist cited in: Calvin Tomkins, Raggedy Andy" in: John Coplan, Andy Warhol, New York 1971). Undoubtedly, Matisse's prolific output and career-long assimilation of decorative imagery like wallpaper and textiles into the realm of oil paint offered an important aesthetic model. The fanciful yet minimalist assemblage of bright colours that characterises, for example, Snow Flowers (1951), speaks to Warhol's own nimble graphic hybridization of high and low cultural imagery.

At first glance, the Flowers' cheery subject matter is psychically anodyne following Warhol's unrelentingly morbid 1962-63 Death and Disaster series, which depicted photographs of plane crashes, electric chairs and suicides; images sometimes sourced from archives of material deemed unpublishable for its gore. Yet the Flowers motif is laced with the tragedy that permeates Warhol's entire oeuvre. Voyeuristically apt in his renderings of fame's transience, Warhol doubtlessly appreciated the hibiscus's potential as a symbol for the beauty and brevity of life under public scrutiny. As ever, Warhol's motif reflected his personal obsessions, while tapping with eerie prescience into the contemporary cultural zeitgeist: one year after Warhol chose the flowers motif, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg would coin the term "Flower Power." At the forefront of New York's avant-garde taste, Warhol's Flowers visualises this nascent and hopeful movement, without forgetting Ginsberg's own hints at its underlying demons in the iconic poem In Back of the Real: "Yellow, yellow flower, and/ flower of industry/ tough spiky ugly flower...This is the flower of the World" (Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, San Francisco 1956, p. 56).