Andy Warhol

Private Collection, Geneva
Private Collection, California
Christie's, New York, May 18, 1979, lot 66
Private Collection
Private Collection, Washington D.C.(gift of the above)

Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969, Vol. 1, New York, 2002, cat. no. 119, pp. 127 and 129,  illustrated in color
Steven Bluttal, ed., Andy Warhol ''Giant'' Size, London, 2006, p. 104, illustrated in color

This work is in good condition overall. The canvas is unlined. There is some hairline cracking to the pigment and minor wear at turning edges and corners with some associated pin-point losses. The canvas is slightly slack on the stretcher. There are a few faint stretcher bar impressions evident. There is some light scattered soiling. Framed.
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.
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In 1962, Andy Warhol embarked upon a series of Stamp paintings, referring both to the subject of the works and the technique used to create them. Warhol had begun his career as a commercial artist drawing for ladies' journals and magazines, but beginning in 1962 he started creating hand-painted drawings and canvases of everyday objects such as Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and American money. In elevating such quotidian, recognizable objects to high art, Warhol sought to reflect his mass-produced subject through a mechanical aesthetic and process, and in 1962, he found his solution in the stamp.

The present work, Blue Airmail Stamp from 1962, is a single blue stamp in the center of a white canvas, larger than a real mailing stamp, but still intimate in size. To create this singular impression, Warhol carved the designs of mail stamps into gum erasers, painted over their surfaces and stamped the designs directly onto paper or canvas. Experimenting with his new technique, Warhol created two series, the Airmail Stamps and the S&H Green Stamps, in which the artist would print a single stamp or multiple stamps on the canvas. For the first time, Warhol took an already two-dimensional, ready-made object and translated it into a two-dimensional replica, translated onto his canvas. The serial repetition mirrored the booklets of stamp contact sheets, with each individual stamp a kind of proxy for actual currency. In this way, the stamp series - like the Dollar bill series - was a self-reflexive examination of American capitalism and consumer culture. 

In respects both conceptual and material, this hand-printing process comprised a critical genesis in the development of Warhol's legendary screen-printing method, which of course ultimately resulted in the creation of some of the most iconic artworks of the Twentieth Century. While the silkscreen mechanical eventually enabled Warhol to remove any semblance of autograph gesture, the act of stamping prefabricated imagery onto canvas initiated the crucial excommunication of the artist's hand from the creative act. 

Through his appropriation of omnipresent, mass-produced pictorial data, Warhol commandeered the preexisting visual lexicon of contemporary culture to analyze the limits of authorship and to interrogate the boundary between specificity and ubiquity in a mass-media age. Moreover, that the imagery he initially selected was specifically functional, specifically two dimensional and, by its very nature, specifically repetitive - postage stamps, packing labels, money - also engaged Saussurian notions of sign systems and extended Duchampian ideas of the readymade. Whereas Duchamp recontextualized an actual urinal and called it Fountain, Warhol here impersonally imitates a postage stamp yet still calls it a postage stamp, even though that label singularly misrepresents the painted object. Unlike artistic predecessors who, since the synthetic cubism of Picasso and Braque, had incorporated found materials in a philosophical effort to eradicate the distinction between presentation and re-presentation, Warhol's earliest groundbreaking art, as epitomized by the present work, brilliantly destabilized assumptions of visual cognition in a media-saturated, hyper-commercialized era. By focusing our attention on the most apparently quotidian signifier of all, the humble postage stamp, Warhol declares the fundamental importance of maintaining individuality in a world of endless homogeneity.