ANDY WARHOL | African Elephant

Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist) Private Collection, New Jersey

Ikon Ltd. Fine Art, Santa Monica

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005

New York, Van de Weghe Fine Art, Andy Warhol: Endangered Species, September - November 2014, p. 3 (installation view), and p. 23, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant, particularly the yellow background and blue paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some extremely minor spots of abrasion at the corners and a diagonal line of raise craquelure measuring approximately 1 inch, in the upper centre of the top left quadrant. There is some masking residue evident in the elephant's left tusk, which is related to the artist's working process. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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African Elephant from 1983 belongs to Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species series – a set of 10 compositional variants depicting animals chosen for their high risk of extinction. Aside from the African Elephant, the following animals were also chosen for the series: Grevy’s Zebra, the Black Rhinoceros, the Orangutan, the Bighorn Ram, the Giant Panda, the Pine Barrons Tree Frog, the San Francisco Silverspot butterfly, the Siberian Tiger and the Bald Eagle (the latter has since been removed from the endangered species list). Warhol – a great animal lover himself – embarked on the series as a result of discussions concerning ecology and beach erosion with New York gallery owners and environmental activists Ronald and Freya Feldman. As a portfolio of prints, alongside individual works on canvas, many examples from the series were given to charities and sold at fundraising events concerned with the preservation of the natural world. Described by Warhol as ‘animals in makeup’, the endangered species were treated in the same typically, and by this time iconic, Warholian manner as his pantheon of stage and screen icons. Set against a bold yellow backdrop, Warhol’s African Elephant is here articulated in screens of complimentary red-purple and grey that are overlaid with blue linear marks. The present work thus contains the uncanny amalgamation of Pop culture signifiers and the macabre that constitute Warhol’s distinctive idiom. Vivid and exuberant, the colours of the Endangered Species stand in tragic opposition to the existential plight that drove the series’ execution. This duality is prevalent throughout Warhol’s career, most memorably in the canvases of Marilyn Monroe. Just as the erasures and imperfections of Warhol’s mechanical silkscreens compounded Monroe’s human fragility and iconic media fame, African Elephant bears blurring, distortion, and shadow that formally mirror the precariousness of its existence. Analogous to Monroe perhaps, the African Elephant has been hunted for its trophy-like beauty and status to the point of utter annihilation.

The present work remains typically complex and equivocal. Indeed, the emotional drive behind the series is counterbalanced by a typical playfulness expressed in the artist’s choice of colour. Famously suspicious of mythology and romance, Warhol used iteration as a tool by which to strip emotion-laden (and hence volatile) objects of their emotional significance: “the more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel” (Andy Warhol cited in: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, Orland 1980, p. 50). Accordingly, and typically Warholian in its double-edged portent, there is a deep set irony at stake in the present painting and the body of work to which it belongs. By dint of their mechanical seriality and jubilant candy-coloured silkscreens, Warhol emphasises and promulgates the iconic, trophy-like, status of these creatures. However, desire, glamour, and beauty – words that apply as much to these animals as to Warhol’s pantheon of screen icons – here mask a more unsettling truth: the underlying danger and destruction inherent within humanity’s selfish and ruthless obsession with beauty and material gain. Hunted to the point of near extinction, the African Elephant is immortalised in Warhol’s canon in a manner that pointedly diminishes and sardonically trivialises humanity’s systematic destruction of the natural world.