The present three-panel folding screen, “Strawberry Jell-o”, was created by artist Andy Warhol during the early stage of his career, and is a remarkable display of the qualities, motifs and artistic modes that characterize his style as a commercial artist in the mid-1950s. The screen offers an intriguing insight into Warhol's formative years and exemplifies his unique artistic sensibility that would earn him worldwide recognition.
The 1950s was a pivotal decade for Warhol. He moved from Pittsburgh to New York City in 1949 with a degree in pictorial design and began a career in commercial art where his first commissions were drawing shoes for Glamour magazine and creating advertising for shoe company Israel Miller. Warhol would soon work with Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Tiffany & Co. At this time, his drawings and illustrations were spirited and whimsical, displaying his predilection for satire and the idea of advertising as an expressive medium. His commercial and personal works included loose, sinewy line drawings and were often void of shading and purposefully lacking in spatial depth. Warhol would incorporate in his illustrations the use of aniline dye, creating bold, punctuated blocks of color. Certainly a precursor to his Pop Art work, the colors were used individually or with only a few other tones in one work. Warhol also experimented with gold and silver-leafing. In tandem with his budding career in the advertising industry, Warhol remained dedicated to artistic exploration and developed further the “blotted line” technique he first created while a student at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), in Pittsburgh. The process utilizes ink transfers to reproduce imagery, arguably a rudimentary form of printmaking and certainly an important aspect of Warhol’s artistic development. By the mid-1950s Warhol was exhibiting at galleries and museums, including at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956. Warhol's art during the 1950s was still developing as he was exploring different styles and themes, but showed signs of his interest in consumer culture, celebrity and the mass media that would become central to his later work.
The present folding screen, “Strawberry Jell-o”, dates to circa 1955-1957 and is one of only a few known screens created by Warhol. The screens are adorned in a variety of motifs executed in an array of artistic styles, indicative of the exploratory nature of his work at this time. For the present example, three wooden panels are held together by double-action hinges with artwork spanning the front surface of all three panels. A faux-aged off-white background combines with the hand written recipe scrawled loosely around the central image to evoke a lovingly used recipe card. At the center is an image of a large reddish-pink Jell-o cake covered in strawberries, presumably created using the blotted line technique. The color and imagery is humble and nostalgic of cozy kitchens and home-cooked meals. The imagery and content relate to another boundary-defying project of Warhol’s completed in 1959, published in conjunction with Suzie Frankfurt: the Wild Raspberries cookbook. The book parodied popular recipes of the time period and mixed in references to popular culture. Replete with spelling errors and whimsical instructions, Frankfurt later referenced the work as “a funny cookbook for people who don’t cook.” In the same vein as the present panel, the pages had singular drawings with color block highlighting and cursive handwriting. The book was produced limitedly, hand-colored by Warhol and friends and mostly given away as gifts. The book, much like “Strawberry Jell-o”, championed his ideology that anything can be art.
The folding screen is a testament to the enduring appeal of food as a central subject in Warhol’s work. He played with scale, enlarging a common hand-held item into a room divider, capturing the essence of everyday life and turning it into art. The central image was created using an experimental image reproducing technique. In the coming decade, Warhol would emerge as an icon of the Pop Art movement - utilizing images of canned food, continuing to enlarge objects, and of course, introducing serial production as a form of fine art. In addition to its rarity, the present lot constitutes an outstanding illustration of Andy Warhol’s early oeuvre, distinctive style and dedication to life as art, making it an exceptional offering.
