Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 960)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1971

Pasadena, Art Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum; Paris, Musée d'Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris; London, Tate Gallery; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andy Warhol, July 1970 - June 1971 (New York only)
Corpus Christi, Art Museum of South Texas, Johns, Stella, Warhol: Works in Series, October - November 1976, p. 33, illustrated
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum; Miami, Miami Art Museum, About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits, September 1999 - June 2000 (Miami only, not listed in the catalogue)

Rainer Crone, Das Bildnerische Werk Andy Warhols, Berlin, 1976, nos. 467-475
Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1970-1974, Vol. 03, New York, 2010, cat. no. 2124, p. 80, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The nine canvases are framed in a wood strip frame with gold facing and a thin black wood strip float.
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.
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The serial portrait, Jan Cowles, is a sophisticated example of Warhol's masterful blending of high and low, wherein art world traditions of portraiture and patronage effortlessly coexist with modern artistic processes of instant imaging and silkscreening. Created at a critical juncture in the Pop art icon's legendary career, Jan Cowles made its debut in the context of his international retrospective that originated at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1970 and was organized by the artist, curator and editor John Coplans. The greatest aesthetic flourish in this exhibition was Warhol's installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the final stop for the show in 1971 and the only venue to include Jan Cowles. Warhol used his Cow Wallpaper for the first time as a backdrop for his paintings, creating a saturated Warholian ambience as this motif covered the gallery walls of the Marcel Breuer designed museum. Jan Cowles was next seen in the inaugural exhibition of the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi and as one of Warhol's earliest commissioned paintings, the portrait's theme of patronage was appropriate. The show, which included Flowers, Self Portraits and a sampling of Warhol's recent portraits, was curated by David Whitney and the museum was designed by Philip Johnson, both significant collectors of Warhol's work. In addition to the intriguing interplay between artist and patron and the role that commissions would soon play in Warhol's world, Jan Cowles is also a painting that speaks stylistically and technically to Warhol's canon of the 1960s, including the Self Portraits, at a time when Warhol returned to painting after an interregnum of a few years at the end of the 1960s and early part of the 1970s.

Jan Cowles, wife of Gardner "Mike" Cowles, Jr., sat for the source photographs for her portrait in 1968, the year of Warhol's exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Since 1965, Warhol had been quoted as "retiring" from painting to focus on film as an experimental medium, but his output would not decline significantly until the attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas in June 1968. Earlier that same year, Warhol had accepted the commission for this portrait from Charlie Cowles, the son of the sitter and an editor of Artforum. Warhol's connections with the Cowles family are intriguing. Mr. and Mrs. Cowles were prestigious collectors who owned one of Warhol's folding screens, and Mrs. Cowles was an active supporter of the Museum of Modern Art and is currently an Honorary Trustee of the museum. Mr. Cowles was a key member in a family-owned media and broadcasting empire, begun in Des Moines, where the family also had a heralded legacy in cultural philanthropy, especially at the Des Moines Art Center. But the most intriguing connections were with Warhol's aesthetic. Concurrent with Mrs. Cowles' sitting, Cowles Communications, Inc. in New York, one of the family's companies, sponsored Warhol's participation in the Art and Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and its process for lenticular photography was used in the flower reproductions in the Los Angeles and Osaka installations of Warhol's Rain Machine of 1969-1971.

The most resonant stylistic connection in Jan Cowles is with Warhol's greatest innovations and predilections: sourcing from the media and appropriating the mechanics of reproduction. As a chronicler of American mass culture, Warhol was more than commonly attuned to the role of the media, not only as a provider of imagery but as the machine behind the creation of fame. In his own right, Gardner Cowles was a co-founder and publisher of Look magazine that appeared in 1937 and pioneered large format photo-journalism along with Henry Luce's Life magazine which emerged a year earlier. While Warhol's innovative silkscreen technique for transferring his sourced photos in the early 1960s was by now well established, the mechanics used to obtain the image had altered. Warhol's first great commission, Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963, The Whitney Museum of American Art) signals the advent of the photo booth that triumphed as Warhol's primary source of portraiture throughout much of the decade. By the time of Jan Cowles's sitting, Warhol took his own photographs with cameras, and with the portraits of Alexandre Iolas, he inaugurated his use of the Polaroid camera. In writing on Ethel Scull's portrait, curator Judith Keller commented on the artist's interest in these new methods of instant photography: "[Warhol] could obtain a pool of photographic portraits for silkscreen paintings by concentrating completely on the stage direction or, in the case of the self-portraits, on his own performance, rather than on the camera's operation." (Exh. Cat., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Nadar/Warhol, New York, 1999, p. 146).

The effectiveness of Warhol's direction is captured by the lively energy and varied expressions of collector Ethel Scull in her 1963 portrait, for which the artist accompanied his sitter to a Photomat in Times Square. The enormous multi-panel portrayal of Scull represents a significant precursor to the format and spirit of Jan Cowles's picture. Ethel Scull 36 Times features seventeen silkscreened images on a kaleidoscope of single-color canvases, depicting Scull in various states of exaltation, sultriness and contemplation, evoking a sort of filmic portrait. Warhol's Screen Tests from the mid 60s also use the method of montage and the recurring silkscreen that comprises Jan Cowles plays with a similarly palpable tension between motion and suspension. Cowles's classic and thoughtful disposition is brought to life by the visually arresting colors of the ground - an array of sienna, crimson, Van Dyke red and cobalt green - as they are offset both in relation to each other and in contrast to the intensity of her dark red silhouette. Warhol's enthrallment with repetition, stemmed from its dynamic ability on both a formal and a deeper metaphorical level.  Indeed, Jan Cowles is a rare example of a multi-panel portrait painting by Warhol after the 1960s. In a 1971 interview with Gerard Malanga, Warhol commented on his use of repetition within a single work by stating, "I started repeating the same image because I liked the way the repetition changed the same image. Also, I felt at the time, as I do now, that people can look at and absorb more than one image at a time." (Kenneth Goldsmith, I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987, New York, 2004, p. 193).

As Warhol slowly recovered from his injuries, his friends rallied in support: from 1968 to 1971, Fred Hughes obtained commissions from Dominque de Menil for her portrait and the portrait of her deceased friend, Jermyn MacAgy, and portraits of Happy Rockefeller, Alexander Iolas, Sandra Brant, Bruno Bischofberger and Dennis Hopper were all created at the time that Warhol returned to the Cowles commission. Portrait commissions would be integral to the revival of his painting canon and serve as an underwriting source for ventures such as Interview, but the alternating modalities of the nine panel Jan Cowles are a bridge between the past and the future of this genre. As noted in the catalogue raisonné of Warhol's work, "Not surprisingly, Jan Cowles's portraits are more closely related to Warhol's portraits of the 1960s than to the decade they herald. The rectangular size of the canvases ...and their grid formation, indicates the Jackie series and the photobooth portraits of the early and mid 1960s...[and] offered Warhol a modular alternative to the 40-inch square of the MacAgy, de Menil, and Iolas portraits ...Cowles's portrait also shows a distinct stylistic relationships with certain works of the late 1960s. This is especially striking in the first, third, and fifth canvases of [Jan Cowles]. In these canvases, the red halftone impression is considerably brighter and more high key than the background color, creating a negative or reversal effect that may be seen among the self-portrait series of 1966 and 1967." (Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1970-1974, Vol. 03, New York, 2010, p. 56). The relationship between Jan Cowles and the poetic shadows of Warhol's 1966-1967 Self Portraits stand as bookends at the beginning and end of Warhol's interregnum as a painter and is eloquent testimony to Warhol's enduring commitment to painting and the power of patronage.