Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #267)

Philip Johnson, Connecticut

Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome

Private Collection, Turin

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1993-94

Toronto, Jerrold Morris International Gallery Limited, Andy Warhol, 1965

Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum; Paris, Musée d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris; London, Tate Gallery; and New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andy Warhol, 1970-71, n.p., no. 28 (text) (Eindhoven); n.p., no. 68 (text) (Paris); and p. 96, no. 112 (text) (London)

Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, p. 300, no. 342 (text)

Rainer Crone, Das Bildnerische Werk Andy Warhols, Berlin 1976, p. 362, no. 658 (text)

Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Volume 02A, 1964-1969, New York 2004, p. 365, no. 1433, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly darker and the illustration fails to convey the metallic quality of the silver paint.Condition:This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some spots of wear to the corners and in places to the extreme edges, some of which have been consolidated. Extremely close inspection reveals three faint scratches, one towards the right edge, approximately 10cm up from the lower edge; one to the centre right of the lower edge; and one towards the left edge, approximately 18cm up from the lower edge; all of which fluoresce darkly under ultra-violet light. Further inspection under ultra-violet light reveals an area of restoration to the top left corner in the margin and three minute specks of in-painting to the centre of the lower left quadrant.
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Reverberating with the searing aftershock of its gripping source image, Andy Warhol’s seminal Little Electric Chair encapsulates within its intimately scaled borders the full thrust of Warhol’s iconic and enigmatic artistic prowess. Not exhibited since its inclusion in the ground-breaking travelling retrospective at the Tate, London and the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven amongst other prominent museums, Little Electric Chair has not been seen in public since 1971. This scintillating exposition of the anxiety lurking beneath the Technicolor façade of 1960s America exemplifies its creator’s affecting deployment of Pop art idioms which, at their most stirring, serve to uncover the unsettling shadows inherent to modern life. The exceptionally crisp screen of the present work acts as a flash bulb, illuminating every area of the visceral scene as if seeking to expose those aspects of the darkest sectors of reality that we actively endeavour to obscure. The exceedingly rare silver acrylic paint used to offset the jet black of Warhol’s silkscreen in the present work serves a dual purpose: evoking quite literally the ‘silver screen’ – one of Warhol’s ultimate sources of inspiration – and thereby positioning Little Electric Chair in the pantheon of established masterpieces by the artist, from Silver Liz, to the entirety of his Elvis corpus, and Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), the monochromatic palette evinced by the luminous silver here also lends this painting a haunting lifelessness that is unparalleled within the remainder of the series and fully in accordance with Warhol’s ultimate vision. Buzzing with menace, this painting seems to vibrate with the precise moment of electrocution, the overwhelming voltage temporarily rendering the world in stark black and white.

The present work is one of 32 Little Electric Chairs that Warhol executed and exhibited together for the first time at Jerrold Morris Gallery in Toronto in 1965. Hung together all on the same wall with only a small interval of space between each canvas, the paintings appeared as a mosaic of units akin to the tesserae wall of 24-inch Flowers famously exhibited at Leo Castelli in 1964. On an adjoining wall Warhol exhibited 30 of his legendary Jackie canvases, created shortly following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and themselves constituting a poignantly insightful commentary on the prevalence of death and disaster in modern life. Unlike these Jackie works, however, Warhol’s 32 Little Electric Chair canvases were each screened against the background of a distinct confectionary hue. The exhibition of these works wholly and perfectly conveyed the seriality integral to Warhol’s conceptual enterprise; set against the kaleidoscopic array of sister paintings, the present work, in its stark monochromatic elegance, undoubtedly retained its own distinctive presence and sensational wall power. Accentuating their momentous historical significance, nine of these Little Electric Chair paintings belong to eminent museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection, Houston.

Initiated in 1962 at Henry Geldzahler’s encouragement to put aside representations of consumer culture and engage with more serious subject matter, Warhol’s Death and Disaster series propelled the artist beyond celebrity and towards critical gravitas. Just as Warhol had challenged our voyeuristic impulses with his subversive depictions of celebrity, Little Electric Chair interrogates the moral psychoses of the mass media, immediately invoking the public’s voracious consumption of death onscreen. Warhol used as his source for the original silkscreen a wire service photograph of the chair at Sing Sing penitentiary in Ossining, New York, an industrial vehicle of ritual killing that executed 614 individuals between 1891 and 1963. This photograph was published on June 19, 1953 – the day that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death at Sing Sing after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, allegedly smuggling information to the Russians pertaining to the atomic bomb. Warhol’s source photograph demonstrated death as it is propped up for the public’s viewing, our alternating emotional index oscillating between fear and an insatiable morbid fascination. Of all of Warhol’s critically lauded Death and Disaster paintings, the Electric Chairs are the only paintings that don’t in fact show the death or the disaster; the terror happens off-screen. The violence is absent and only implied, leaving the viewer to feel only the shock rather than see it first hand. In many ways, the imagination has the capacity to inflict a worse horror than simply witnessing the execution: with the ambiguity of death that Warhol’s image allows, looking at it we occupy the role of both voyeur and participant, the executioner and the executed. Little Electric Chair sees man become the orchestrator of his own demise through his invention of this killing machine – Warhol spins a circuitous parable of birth and death that marks a particular, yet timeless, moment in American history. In keeping with Warhol's very best work, celebrity, tragedy, and the absurdity of human transience inhabit the very being of this breathtaking painting, a treatise on the emotional conditioning of our time.