安迪·沃荷

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 633)
Private Collection, USA (acquired from the above in May 1965)
Private Collection

Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1964 - 1969, Vol. 02B, New York, 2004, cat. no. 1479, p. 41, illustrated in color

This painting is in very good condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a blonde wood frame with a small 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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Broadcasting one of the most indisputably iconic images of Pop Art in a spectacularly arresting palette of brilliant pinkish red, black and white, Andy Warhol's twenty-four inch Flowers is a vestige of the artist's monumental realization of a conceptually infinite art. It is central to a small group of Flowers that Warhol created at the end of 1964 and beginning of 1965 incorporating the pared-down elegance of a pure white background rather than the more figurative literal green background. Indeed, it was the white background that would subsequently become ubiquitous for the series he showed at the legendary exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris later in 1965. Created at a moment between two of the most renowned Warhol exhibitions of the 1960s where he showed just Flowers canvases - with Leo Castelli in November 1964 and Sonnabend in May 1965 - the present work embodies the quintessence of Pop Art in each of composition, execution and conceptual ambition.

Through the decades since the 1960s Warhol's Flower paintings have pervaded a global consciousness as the totemic standard of classic American Pop; their imagery acting as talismanic metaphor for a generation that changed not only artistic but also social and political topographies in a supremely transformative decade. Unlike the artist's legendary subjects of that period concerned principally with consumerism, celebrity, death and disasters, the Flower corpus was a significant departure to the more abstract; not only in terms of aesthetic character but also of philosophical import. While the paintings that immediately preceded the Flowers typically represented narrative fact, recorded through the objectivity of the camera lens and re-contextualized through the artist's impassionate silkscreen, this series re-presents an ultimately quotidian subject devoid of context. There is no story behind these petals of a spectacular rise to fame or untimely death; no self-evident critique of the agents of celebrity culture or the manipulation of collective psychology through the engines of mass-media. Even the Dollar Bills and Campbell's Soup Can pictures that pioneered his concept of endlessly proliferating imagery were wedded to the specific cultural inheritance of the American Dream and consumer culture. With the indeterminate content of the Flowers, Warhol invited, for the first time, a far greater degree of interpretation, questioning and reflection from the spectator, thereby instituting a far grander range of individual subjective response. Indeed, it is precisely due to the conceptual accessibility of the anti-didactic and egalitarian imagery of the Flowers that it has proliferated as such a potent symbol of an entire artistic movement.

The source image originated in a series of color photographs of seven hibiscus blossoms printed in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography, taken by editor Patricia Caulfield to demonstrate the varying visual effects of different exposure times and filter settings. The seriality of the images in Modern Photography undoubtedly appealed to Warhol's acute sensitivity to image repetition, although rather than transfer the entire page of the magazine with four rectangular images of flowers, he isolated and cropped a square composition that included four flowers from one of the reproduced photos. This meant that ultimately the artist would control the terms of replication, variation and manipulation in his paintings more closely in multi-panel arrangements. This crop was then transferred onto acetate and its tonal range polarized to increase sharpness and provide the optimum template for the silkscreen to be made. Warhol chose the square format because of its refutation of a fixed orientation and the four possible compositional options available. Of course, this also perfectly suited the variable alignment of the flowers themselves, which had been shot on film from an overhead perspective and could hence be viewed any way up. "I like painting on a square," he explained, "because you don't have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it's just a square." (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 191)

When he was presented with the opportunity to show new work with Sonnabend in Paris, opening in May 1965, Warhol immediately set about creating new Flowers canvases while the Castelli show was still open. In Paris, as in New York, the paintings were presented in different sizes like tiles to fill their designated wall spaces. In this respect both these landmark exhibitions can be viewed as installations, continuing the underlying concept of the Ferus and Stable shows whereby works wrapped or filled their physical environment as manifestation of a total viewing experience.

Warhol's updated interpretation of the age-old Still Life motif of flowers is consciously banal and synthetic. In the first instance he rejected the intricate and hierarchical compositions of the grand tradition of Still-Life painting in western Art History in favor of an overhead perspective which banishes the horizon and flattens and distorts the shape of each petal. Secondly, the complex color harmonies of that tradition, from Dutch still-lifes to Monet's water lilies, say, are abolished in favor of planar zones of flat unnatural color, rendered in artificial Day-Glo and fluorescent paints such as aurora pink in the present work. As colorful and attractive as the Flowers paintings are to the eye, they nevertheless have a more subversive and subliminal reference to the presence of death in life, a constant theme throughout Warhol's output, even before Valerie Solanas entered the Factory and nearly killed him with a gun in 1968. From his images of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, suicides, car crashes, and electric chairs to the skulls and even self-portraits of his later career, the brevity of life frequently lingers under the acrylic and silkscreen ink of his canvases. Flowers are symbols of nature's fragile impermanence and the fugitive quality of beauty, as noted eloquently by John Coplans." What is incredible about the best of the flower paintings…is that they present a distillation of much of the strength of Warhol's art - the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer's gaze. The garish and brilliantly colored flowers always gravitate toward the surrounding blackness and finally end in a sea of morbidity. No matter how much one wishes these flowers to remain beautiful they perish under one's gaze, as if haunted by death.'' (John Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York, 1978, p. 52)