安迪·沃荷

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 103)

OK Harris Works of Art, New York

Dr and Mrs Donald S. Dworken, Connecticut (acquired from the above circa 1969)

Sale: Christie’s, New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 16 May 2007, Lot 14

Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner

Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Eidenhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum; Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; London, Tate Gallery; and New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andy Warhol, 1970-71, no. 86

George Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Volume 2A, 1964-1969, New York 2004, p. 302 (text) 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and brighter in the original. Condition: This work has been relined. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals a repaired tear to the upper left flower and a small spot of fluorescence to the top of the bottom left flower.
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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."

Executed in an arresting palette of vivid green, fiery orange and dusky pink, the present work enchantingly illustrates one of Pop’s most iconic bodies of work: Warhol’s Flowers. During the half century since their creation, Warhol's flower paintings have infiltrated our global consciousness as the emblem of classic American Pop; their imagery acting as a metaphor for a generation that changed not only artistic but also social and political topographies in a supremely transformative decade. As is mythologised in art history, during the summer of 1964 he created canvases in square formats measuring 82, 48 and 24 inches respectively, intended for a show with his new dealer Leo Castelli due to open in New York in November of that year. Michael Lobel emphasises this exhibition’s significance: “The show, his first with the gallery, represented a career milestone, since his first attempt at showing with Castelli, in 1961, had been met with rejection… Now he was joining the gallery that represented the cream of the crop of American vanguard art, including such leading lights as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella” (Michael Lobel, ‘In Transition: Warhol’s Flowers’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Eykyn Maclean, Andy Warhol Flowers, 2012, n.p.). The creation of his enigmatic flower paintings thus marked the apogee of artistic recognition for Warhol and truly served to carve out his position as a colossal force amongst a pantheon of artistic luminaries.

After the Death and Disaster series of 1962-1963, which portrayed sensational images of electric chairs, suicides and atrocious car crashes, the motif of four bright hibiscus flowers was almost soothing, a palliative to the horror and violence of previous works. The source image originated in a series of colour 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 repetitious nature of the images in Modern Photography undoubtedly appealed to Warhol's marked interest in seriality. From the source image he cropped out three flowers and rotated the remaining four for a tighter composition. This crop was then transferred onto acetate and its tonal range polarised to increase sharpness and provide the optimum template for the silkscreen process.

While the paintings that immediately preceded the Flowers typically denoted narrative fact, this series re-presents an ultimately banal subject devoid of context. There is no apparent background story of a spectacular rise to fame or untimely death; no self-evident critique of the agents of celebrity. 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 an enlarged range for 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. 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 coloured 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).