- 26
Andy Warhol
Description
- Andy Warhol
- Flowers
- signed and dated 64 on the overlap
- acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
- 61 by 61cm.; 24 by 24in.
Provenance
Mr and Mrs Albert Gartenberg, New York
Stellan Holm Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
Literature
Condition
"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
Warhol’s production of flower paintings has become legendary: 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 opening in New York in November of that year. Michael Lobel argues that the exhibition of the Flower series at Leo Castelli marked a highly significant point in Warhol’s career: “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 production of the flower paintings thus arguably marked a new peak of recognition and acceptance for Warhol as one of the most important artists of this period, enabling him to take his place as a creative giant amongst this pantheon of revered artistic figures active in post-war New York.
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 towards the more abstract; not only in terms of aesthetic character but also of philosophical import. Whilst the paintings that immediately preceded the flowers typically represented narrative fact, recorded through the objectivity of the camera lens and re-contextualised 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 an untimely death; no self-evident critique of the agents of celebrity culture or the manipulation of collective psychology through the engines of mass-media. 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 series that it has proliferated as such a potent symbol of an entire artistic movement.
Heiner Bastian has discussed the powerful impact of Warhol's Flower series, suggesting that they convey "a virtual, painful stillness. Since they seemingly only live on the surface, in the stasis of their coloration, they also initiate only the one metamorphosis which is a fundamental tenet of Warhol's work: moments in a notion of transience. The flower pictures were for Everyman, they embodied Warhol's power of concretization, the shortest possible route to stylization, both open to psychological interpretation and an ephemeral symbol. But the flowers... were also to be read as metaphors for the flowers of death. Warhol's Flowers resist every philosophical transfiguration as effectively as the pictures of disasters and catastrophes which they now seem ever closer to" (Heiner Bastian in: Exhibition Catalogue, Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Andy Warhol: Retrospective, 2002, p. 33). Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, the motif of the flourishing hibiscus ultimately serves as a metaphor for the fleeting brevity of celebrity, and, by extension, references the fragile beauty of life itself.