Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Holly and Horace Solomon, New York (acquired from the above circa 1964)
John Solomon, Los Angeles (gifted from the above)
Sotheby’s, New York, November 17, 1992, Lot 16
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Vienna, KunstHausWien; Athens, National Gallery; Thessaloniki, National Gallery; Orlando, Orlando Museum of Art; Fort Lauderdale, Museum of Art; Andy Warhol, February 1993 - March 1994, n.p., cat. no. 10, illustrated in color
Taipei, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Andy Warhol 1928-1987, October - November 1994
Lausanne, Fondation de l'Hermitage, Andy Warhol, May - October 1995
Milan, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Andy Warhol, October 1995 - February 1996
Ludwigshafen, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Andy Warhol, September 1996 - January 1997, cat. no. 75, p. 115, illustrated in color
Helsinki, Helsinki Kunsthalle, Andy Warhol, August – November 1997
Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie; Krakow, Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, Andy Warhol, March – July 1998, cat. no. 61, p. 168, illustrated in color
Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Warhol, October - December 1999
Kochi, The Museum of Art; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Umeda-Osaka, Daimaru Museum; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary; Kawamura, Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Niigata, Niigata City Art Museum, Andy Warhol, February 2000 – February 2001, cat. no. 73, p. 91, illustrated in color 
Monaco, Grimaldi Forum, SuperWarhol, July - August 2003, cat. no. 45, p. 76, illustrated in color
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, temporary loan, September 2005 - May 2006
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, Andy Warhol: The Early Sixties: Paintings and Drawings 1961-1964, September 2010 - January 2011, cat. no. 48

Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1987, 4^th Edition revised and expanded by Frayda Feldman and Claudia Defendi, New York, 2003, p. 47, cat. no. 1.3 [b], illustrated

This work is in excellent condition. There is a very small speck of accretion to the extreme right edge, 13 inches from the top right corner. There is a small circular repaired tear to the extreme left edge, 19¼ - 20¼ inches from the top left corner; and a small ¼ inch tear one inch below that. The sheet is hinged to ragboard and framed in a dull metal strip frame under Plexiglas.
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.

Visual aesthetics, rigorous use of composition and astute choice of subject matter come together in Andy Warhol’s, Suicide, 1964, to create a work of power, beauty and tragedy.  After decades of modernist abstraction, Pop Art restored representation and objective imagery to painting, reflecting the world in which it thrived via electronic and print media.  Many interpreted the subject matter of Pop Art as too readily recognizable and easily accessible and did not realize the deeper conceptual aesthetic issue that was central to Warhol’s oeuvre - how modern media was affecting modern life and consciousness.  Andy Warhol stands as one of the most acute observers of this phenomenon.  Suicide is an outstanding example of the artist’s Death and Disaster series that reveals Warhol’s pre-occupation with the contradictions inherent in public and private despair.

The Death and Disaster series may have at first appeared to be a startling choice of subject for the new star of Pop Art and the painter of mundane consumer products such as the Campbell’s Soup Can.  Yet, over the intervening decades, this body of work has been recognized as his most important and complex.  Warhol had a striking fascination with death and, overtly or subtly, the theme is a vein that runs through a large portion of his overall output – from celebrity paintings to self-portrait to car crashes. The Deaths and Disasters were both self-inflicted, and socially determined.  They do not appear at all sentimental; capturing the choreography of death rather than the emotional import.  The raw humanism of the images of suicides, catastrophes, tragic car accidents and capital punishment is juxtaposed against Warhol’s desire to be detached and machine-like, revealing the contradictory impulse that led him to produce such powerful and moving works of art.

In the 1960’s, items such as advertisements, movie stills, magazines and newspaper photographs played a dominant role in artists’ creative thinking.  A dramatic growth in leisure time among affluent societies increased readership of print and film media.  Often the same photograph or video clip was shown repeatedly in periodicals and on television screens, inuring the public to certain images no matter how potent their content.  The irony of this appealed to Warhol, who subtly used this brand of imagery to infuse raw emotion into his subject matter.  Warhol began his Electric Chairs in 1963, exploring the banality of death in the modern world.  An empty electric chair is a forceful and jarring image of death that is instantly recognizable as an iconic image of legalized and supposedly civilized killing.  In Warhol’s Suicides death is humanized.  In both series the viewer is presented with a sense of imminence.  There is an unsettling emptiness in the Electric Chair paintings, as though the victim is waiting to be brought to execution.  In the present work the viewer can not help but anticipate the ultimate fate of the free falling body.

As opposed to the single image focus of the Suicides, Warhol at times chose to cloak images from the Death and Disaster series in repeated patterns. The Car Crash series depicts anonymous victims and indiscriminate death in a much more blatant manner, as we witness the brutal aftermath of accidents, yet when Warhol chose to screen the image multiple times, there is a sense of “slippage” in their impact that results both from the artist’s technique and the nature of news photography. Ultimately however, even within his detached stance, the artist’s actual intent was not to render the scene as anonymous but to point out the particularities and unique tragedy of an individual death.  In a 1963 interview, Warhol described his attraction to his source material.  “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect. …and I thought people should think about them some time. …It’s not that I feel sorry for them, it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered.” (Gene Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, Artnews 62, November 1963, pp. 60-61)

In 1962 Warhol created the artistic enterprise for which he is most famous – the use of silkscreen technique to create fine art.  The medium appealed to Warhol visually for its tonal contrasts and grainy cinematic effects, but more importantly he appreciated the flexibility of the medium.  Warhol is believed to have created his first Suicide silkscreen on paper in 1962, one of his earliest uses of the photographic silkscreen process.  In 1964, Warhol produced an elite corpus of works based on this photograph, creating one of the most powerful images of his entire oeuvre. The present work is an outstanding example from this esteemed series. Warhol’s silkscreens on paper, such as the present work, The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) and Cagney, have an individuality as they demonstrate the silkscreen process at its most basic – the variables in ink and the action of the screening itself.  The incredible tonal range, raw imagery, and intense subject matter of Suicide produce an effective impact on the viewer and make the work a resonant example of Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series.