Andy Warhol

Marisa del Re Gallery, New York

Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1983) 

Sale: Sotheby’s, New York, Contemporary Art, 15 November 2007, Lot 210

Galleria Tega, Milan

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Rome, Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi; and New York, Marisa del Re Gallery, Warhol Verso de Chirico, 1982-83, p. 49, illustrated in colour

Cologne, Edition Schellmann, Andy Warhol: Art from Art, 1994, p. 32, no. 15, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a small indentation towards the lower right corner and a short hairline crack approximately 10cm above this, and one to the centre of the lower edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
"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."

“All my images are the same…but very different at the same time… they change with the light of colours, with the times and moods… Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”

Andy Warhol quoted in: ‘Industrial Metaphysics: Interview with Andy Warhol By Achille Bonito Oliva,’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Palazzo delle Prigoni Vecchie, Warhol Verso De Chirico, 1987 p. 70.

Mapped out as a shimmering vision of mechanically repetitive, technicolour frames, Andy Warhol’s iconic Hector and Andromache (After de Chirico) orchestrates a collision of two of the greatest artistic minds of the Twentieth Century. Enacting an astute philosophical contemplation on the power of image-making within the modern age, this work forms part of a series which saw Warhol return to ‘art’ as a subject. Warhol thus shifted the role of the artist from the position of sole creator to one of keen observer and cultural arbiter. As a technically daring and visually stunning embodiment of this claim, Hector and Andromache (After de Chirico) holds a poignant place in the history of twentieth-century image making.

Vertical strands of acidic greens, reds and blues clash with horizontal reds and turquoises marking the mechanical linearity of Warhol’s silkscreen technique whilst evoking the primary colours of the CMYK printing technique. Instantly attributable to the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, here the image is defamiliarised through impersonal repetition, as if it has been cut from a longer string of prints, or perhaps the negative of a film.

Whilst Warhol’s earliest reproduced icons were popular movie stars, here ‘high culture’ becomes a subject, typified in de Chirico’s enduring homage to the classical European tradition. Warhol first reproduced an iconic art image after the only time that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was exhibited in New York in 1963, certifying that artworks are also party to the fame that fascinated Warhol endlessly. However it was not until the early 1980s that he returned to this theme, taking into his visual repertoire Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, as well as works by Lucas Cranach The Elder, Raphael, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch.

Warhol’s conceptually discerning turn to the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico was spurred by renowned collector Carlo Berlotti in 1982. Influential to the French Surrealists who later repudiated him, de Chirico’s paintings centered on the idea of enigma. Here the subjects are typically taken from Greek mythology, yet they are presented as mysterious anatomical mannequins, referring to the art of drawing and the Renaissance construct of linear perspective. Thus de Chirico quotes the rationality and order that classical art embodied in order to make something altogether strange. Notably Warhol pays homage to this paradoxical interest in pictorial construction through his distinct bands of colour, both regimented and discordant.

A penchant for quotation, repetition and appropriation binds Warhol to de Chirico, the latter of whom repeated his own paintings towards the end of his career.  Warhol commented that de Chirico “viewed repetition as a way of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common… The difference? What he repeated regularly, year after year, I repeat the same day in the same painting” (Andy Warhol, quoted in: Ibid., p. 70). Whilst de Chirico recycled stereotypical forms from art history, Warhol turns his lens to more recent art expressing his interest in the accelerated speed of image reproduction and nostalgia in the Twentieth Century, but also the closing distance between mass culture and high-culture which drove his self-professed celebration of superficiality.

Whilst de Chirico’s tableaus approach the surreal veneer of a dream, Warhol’s practice was intimately bound to a different field of latent desire: the American dream, a realm in which the hopes and fears of the wilful consumer are guided by products and the mass media. The American dream embodies a system of cultural discernment which art stands at the apex of; a hierarchy abolished by Warhol’s distanced, sarcastically neutral and non-critical reproduced visions. As noted by Lazlo Glazer, “both Campbell’s Tomato Soup and the Mona Lisa receive the same basic treatment; the subject is transferred in multiple by silkscreen onto canvas” (Lazlo Glazer, ‘A guest Performance on the Painter’s Olympus’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Colonge, Edition Schellmann, Andy Warhol: Art from Art, 1994, p. 7).

Warhol presents the banal and the fantastic with optic equality, vilifying the pervasive power of mass-reproduction without negating the unique power of an image. His idiosyncratically aestheticised process stands testament to a unique and enduringly influential vision, which both commented on and changed the course of art forever.