Lot 18
  • 18

Andy Warhol

Estimate
650,000 - 850,000 GBP
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Description

  • Andy Warhol
  • Flowers
  • signed and dated 1965 on the reverse
  • acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
  • 61 by 61cm.
  • 24 by 24in.

Provenance

Galerie Veranneman, Kruishoutem
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1975

Condition

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a very faint and short diagonal rub mark above the top left orange flower. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals minute spots of retouching to the extreme top and bottom left corner tips, a thin line and three very thin hairlines towards the centre of the extreme top overturn edge.
"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."

Catalogue Note

A pure icon from the evolution of Pop Art, Andy Warhol's twenty-four inch Flowers of 1965 reside in the premium tier of the artist's exceptional output. Along with his Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyns, Warhol's Flowers rank among the timeless artistic paragons of twentieth-century art. Just as it had done for his series of dollar bills and soup cans, the idea to make flowers the subject of a major series supposedly came not from Warhol but from a friend – in this case Henry Geldzahler, then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Warhol found the source image for his Flower series in a photograph by Patricia Caulfield of seven hibiscus blossoms presented as a fold-out in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. The seriality of the image - intended to illustrate the varying visual effect of different exposure times and filter settings – no doubt held immediate charm for him as he set about transforming it by rotating one of the flowers 180 degrees and cropping the composition into its present square format. Warhol chose the square because of the denial of a fixed upright and the resultant range of orientations that it affords. "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."(cited in: David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 191)

As typified by the present work, the twenty-four inch Flowers reflect the degree to which Warhol had honed and refined the screen-printing process throughout this crucial phase of his artistic development, when he essentially made this revolutionary method his own. He was attracted by the affinity of the silkscreen with the mass-media printing aesthetic of consumer culture and by its anonymous, luxuriously slick facture which annulled the individual hand of the artist. By removing himself from the creative equation, Warhol sought to communicate more directly with the established popular currency that blended high and low culture imagery.

In choosing to the disarmingly innocuous motif of tiny hibiscus flowers, Warhol was wilfully engaging with an established canon of still-life painting stretching back centuries: "With the Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we're doing my Flower period! Like Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's flowers, the genre." (Gerard Malanga cited in: A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York 2003, p. 74).Warhol's updated interpretation of this age-old motif, however, is consciously banal and synthetic. In the first instance he rejects the intricate and hierarchical compositions of the Dutch still-life tradition in favour of an overhead perspective which banishes the horizon and flattens and distorts the shape of each petal. Secondly, the complex colour harmonies of Monet's water lilies, say, are abolished in favour of planar zones of flat colour. Throughout the series, Warhol chose synthetic, unnatural colours whose artificial hues belied their manufactured plasticity. In the twenty-four inch Flowers, and with the present work a case in point, he began to use fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic paints to further enhance the artificiality of the image.

It was the group of Flowers In this scale that also provided the material for Warhol's first sell-out show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Having left the Stable Gallery Warhol was comparatively free during the summer of 1964 to concentrate on preparing work for his inaugural show at Leo Castelli scheduled for November that year. An artist who regularly worked in series, Warhol characteristically preferred to dedicate his gallery exhibitions to a single theme, subject or sequence, as epitomised by the seminal exhibition of 32 Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. Warhol's move to Leo Castelli provided the catalyst for a new set of works whose success was so instantaneous that they all sold immediately and quickly became synonymous with the Pop movement which was rapidly gaining international credence. In the installation at the gallery, the canvases perfectly exploited the full pictorial potential of the multiple orientations: Warhol arranged twenty-eight of the twenty-four inch Flowers in four rows of seven along the floating wall panel that masked the gallery's windows on East 77th Street. Arranging the canvases like tesserae, Warhol elicited subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases, the amorphous curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialising the rectilinear grid-like structure created by the gaps between the canvases.

The Flower paintings are the most abstract works that Warhol produced in the 1960s. As was his usual practice, when converting the original colour source photograph into a two tone screen, he radically heightened the contrast so that in the registration of the image on canvas, the minute details are lost and the forms become increasingly ambiguous. After the Death and Disaster series of 1962-1963 – which depicted sensational images of electric chairs, suicides and horrendous car crashes – the motif of four brightly blooming hibiscus flowers was almost anodyne, a palliative to the horror an violence of previous imagery. However despite its apparent decorative quality, which doubtless appealed to Warhol in his program to make a truly popular art form, the motif is laced with the morbidity that permeates his entire oeuvre. Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, the motif of the flourishing hibiscus serves as a metaphor for the fleeting transience of celebrity – the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer's gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as an allegory for the frailty and fragility of life.