Lot 48
  • 48

ANDY WARHOL | Hammer and Sickle

Estimate
2,500,000 - 3,500,000 GBP
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Description

  • Andy Warhol
  • Hammer and Sickle
  • signed on the overlap
  • acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
  • 183.2 by 218.5 cm. 72 1/8 by 86 in.
  • Executed in 1976.

Provenance

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich

Private Collection

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Exhibited

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Andy Warhol: Hammer and Sickle Paintings and Drawings, January 1977 Hartfort, Wadsworth Atheneum, Andy Warhol/Matrix 50, May - September 1979, n.p., illustrated

Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Andy Warhol: Hammer and Sickle, June 1999, n.p., no. 34, illustrated in colour

Literature

Yoshihiko Shirakura, Andy Warhol: Shinchosha's Super Artists, Tokyo 1990, p. 42, no. 41, illustrated in colour (installation view at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1977)

Condition

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Catalogue Note

The present work belongs to a larger corpus of paintings through which Andy Warhol subsumed and subverted iconic Communist imagery. Alongside the Mao series of 1972-74 and the Lenin portraits from 1986, the Hammer and Sickle works are some of the most politically charged and visually potent of Warhol’s career. Just as the simple grey tones of Zhang Zhenshi’s carefully staged 1950 portrait of Chairman Mao were co-opted and undermined by Warhol’s colourful and liberal application of pigment to the surface of his works, the two-dimensionality and simplicity of the crossed hammer and sickle is changed fundamentally in Warhol’s re-presentation. As opposed to charged outlines respectively symbolising the industrial and agrarian proletariat, Warhol’s hammer and sickle are weighty and three-dimensional. The heavy shadows force the viewer to confront these two objects as existing within space, as opposed to being emblazoned on a flat surface; however the dissolution of the pictorial boundaries of foreground and background, of object and shadow, flatten this newly established perspective. This leaves the viewer with two contrasting ways of viewing the painting: one where the weight of the objects is foregrounded and the red shadows lend depth, and another where the pictorial frame is flattened, and the abstracted forms of the shadows create a new emblem altogether. Both of these readings alter and lessen the symbolic power of the two objects; however it is in his positioning and branding of them that Warhol truly asserts his power over this carefully curated symbol of Communist zeal. Executed on an immersive and impressive scale, the present work is one of the best examples from this pivotal series. The sharp contrast of the black silkscreen with the sanguineous red underpainting points to the consummate skill of an artist at the peak of his abilities, while the tight juxtaposition of the blade of the sickle and the head of the hammer lends anchor to the composition. Conceptually rigorous in its political implications and visually arresting in its colourful and carefully balanced composition, Hammer and Sickle is an enduring testament to Warhol’s position as one of the most considered and intelligent painters of the modern era.

The symbol of the hammer and sickle itself requires some analysis in order to fully grasp the extent of Warhol’s sabotage. Introduced following the Russian revolution in 1917, the two objects symbolised not only the industrial and agricultural worker, but their international unity. Later it took on gendered meaning, with the hammer associated with men and the sickle with women. As an ensemble, it represented the unity of the Socialist message against the disparate forces of Capitalism and Western democracy. The composition of the present work, however, one of 12 variations that Warhol used for the series, sees the two objects divorced from one another; their symbolic weight as an emblem of unity is thus entirely eliminated. As a corollary to this, Warhol’s sly inclusion of the branding of the sickle, appropriately titled ‘Champion No. 15’, implicitly celebrates the superiority of American consumerism against Russian Communism. This superimposition of American excess onto a symbol of non-hierarchical, anti-consumerist equality, changes the function of the image altogether. As Georg Frei astutely comments in his introduction to the seminal exhibition of works from the series at Thomas Ammann Fine Art in 1999, in which the present work was included, following the dismantling of the symbol into its constituent parts, “the objects have no secrets, no ulterior meaning: a hammer is a hammer, a sickle is a sickle. Created long before glasnost and perestroika, these works seem to us today almost like a prophetic prediction” (Georg Frei, ‘Hammer and Sickle – A Painterly Manifesto’ in: Exh. Cat., Zurich, Thomas Ammann, Andy Warhol: Hammer and Sickle, 1999, n.p.).

The inspiration for the Hammer and Sickle paintings came after Warhol exhibited works from his Ladies and Gentlemen series in Ferrara in 1975. Images of black and Latin American transvestites appealed hugely to the Italian left, who saw the works as a radical political statement and an entirely novel form of political portraiture. This sentiment was borne of an influential swathe of Socialist sympathy in Italy, which resulted in a peppering of hammer and sickle graffiti on the walls of municipal buildings in the major Italian cities. This attitude to Communism was quite unlike the preponderant reaction of the American public, prompting Warhol to remark to Bob Colacello: “Maybe I should do real Communist paintings next. They would sell a lot in Italy” (Andy Warhol cited in: Bob Colacello, Holy Terror, Andy Warhol Close Up, New York 1990, p. 228). Notwithstanding the irony of Warhol’s immediate commercialisation of the Communist symbol, the distinction that Warhol implicitly draws between the European and American attitudes to Socialism is significant. After all, the Hammer and Sickle works, even if engineered to appeal to a European audience, were widely shown in America. As one journalist observed on the occasion of their debut at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York in 1977, in which the present work was also featured, although “the hammer and sickle themselves are objects of beauty,” and Warhol does much to prevent any ulterior meaning being attached to them, “politics cannot be banished entirely from this image” (John Russell, ‘Art: Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle’, The New York Times, 21 January 1977, online). Given the concerted campaign of fear-mongering foisted upon the American people for the preceding decade, ranging in its outlets from children’s books to news bulletins to television specials, the lingering political significance of this symbol cannot be underestimated. The Hammer and Sickle was the placeholder for a malicious power, the only credible threat to American hegemony, and was, fundamentally, a threatening and terrifying emblem. Quite unlike the images employed earlier in Warhol’s career, such as the Five Deaths or Marilyn series where repetition of the image deadens its emotional effect, the power of the Communist icons – Mao, Lenin and the Hammer and Sickle – was amplified by their repetition. Warhol relished the fear that this image would instinctively instill, and the power that he was able to wield by co-opting and altering it. Indeed, by changing the aesthetic of the symbol, Warhol places himself in a position of ultimate authority over Soviet representation of itself.



This work is stamped by the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and numbered PA25.002.