Andy Warhol

Exh. Cat., Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Andy Warhol, February - March 1968, n.p., illustrated
Christopher Finch, Pop Art: Object and Image, London 1968, p. 141, illustrated in color
Udo Kulterman, Neue Formen des Bildes, Tübingen 1969, pl. 95, illustrated
Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, cat. no. 101
Rainer Crone, Das Bildnerische Werk Andy Warhols, Berlin 1976, cat. no. 110
Udo Kulterman, Neue Formen des Bildes, Boulder 1977, rev. US ed., pl.  44, p. 28, illustrated
David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1997, pl. 138, illustrated and
illustrated in color on the cover
George Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One: Paintings and Sculpture 1961 - 1963, New York 2002, cat. no. 535, p. 454, illustrated in color

 “The girls that summer in Brooklyn looked really great. It was the summer of the Liz-Taylor-in-Cleopatra look – long, straight, dark, shiny hair with bangs and Egyptian-Looking eye makeup … It was a great summer” (Andy Warhol)

“It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.” (Andy Warhol)

Andy Warhol’s magnificent Liz, executed between October and November 1963, is one of a rare series of only thirteen paintings of Elizabeth Taylor he made on colored backgrounds. It is the only painting in this series that has a vibrant ‘naphthol red light’ background and, like all but one of these examples, measures 40 by 40 inches. This series of ‘colored Liz’ paintings represents the apotheosis of Warhol’s creative vision, both as the technician of the (still then) revolutionary silkscreen process, and the architect of the various ideas he used to build monuments to the vagaries of celebrity. The present painting is the outstanding example of this celebrated group. Its status is elevated because of the excellent registration of the silkscreen. The hair, eyes, nose and lips all display wonderful plasticity and detail. This is further enhanced by the saturated crimson background, pushing the silhouette out of the picture plane, and lusciously conveying the film star’s lips. Color is crucial to any appreciation of Warhol’s art and red, above any other color, was reserved for his most concentrated and important compositions.

As with his images of Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy, Warhol’s depictions of Elizabeth Taylor display not so much his ambition to record the prose of physical likeness, but more his love affair with the drama and glamour of celebrity. For Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor was much more than just a celebrated actress. She was the survivor of a near fatal illness, a goddess of the silver screen, and the embodiment of the trinity of mortality, celebrity and fame which so fascinated the artist.

Warhol’s deep involvement with the image of Elizabeth Taylor appeared very early in his career, beginning with his Disaster paintings. When Warhol was still largely painting his canvases by hand, he borrowed subject matter from the front pages of tabloids and newspapers, beginning in 1961. Warhol’s second and largest ``headline’’ painting, Daily News (1962), was based on the front and back pages of a March 29, 1962 newspaper, with the front page headline ``Eddie Fisher Breaks Down: In Hospital Here, Liz in Rome’’. For Warhol, tabloid papers were either vehicles for mass disaster, rendering tragic circumstances almost mundane by their commonplace repetition, or the purveyors of celebrity and fame to an avid audience. In figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy, Warhol found the ideal subjects that combined both aspects of the mass media culture where accessibility turned private tragedy into public myth. By isolating and then serializing such images, Warhol began the practice of, essentially, commodifying celebrity, just as he had earlier catalogued the darker side of life with his various images of car crashes, race riots and ‘electric chairs’. This, in turn, would affect a later generation of artists, most notably Jeff Koons, whose work seems to celebrate the Warholian process of ‘commodification’.

In the early 1960s, Liz Taylor had emerged from a string of successful films that signaled her complete transformation from the child star of National Velvet (1944) to the heated sex symbol of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and Butterfield 8 (1960). Often, Taylor’s personal life superceded her professional accomplishments as the public passionately followed her early marriages, the tragic death of her third husband Mike Todd, and her role as the other woman in the break-up of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds’ marriage – all before the actress had turned 30. Most tellingly for Warhol, the young voluptuous woman had a dramatic brush with early death. After begrudgingly playing the prostitute role in Butterfield 8, Taylor traveled to London in 1960 with her then husband Fisher to begin filming Cleopatra. While there, the actress suffered from a near-fatal respiratory illness, during which she was actually briefly pronounced dead, finally recovering after an emergency tracheotomy. While Taylor had been acknowledged by critics and Hollywood with Oscar nominations for two previous roles in the late 1950s, it was her role in Butterfield 8 that garnered the actress her first Academy Award. The sympathy engendered by her operation and illness was perceived as a factor in her award, as her scar was visibly apparent on the night of the ceremonies.

This combination of glamour and tragedy appealed to Warhol’s fascination with fame and his own deep sense of morbidity, and in 1962, the personae of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor would become Warhol’s ultimate muses in establishing iconic symbols of popular culture. While his series of colored Marilyn paintings were inspired by the shocking news of Monroe’s suicide in August 1962, Warhol’s focus on Elizabeth Taylor was generated from a ten page feature on her marital history and career in the April 13, 1962 issue of Life, portraying Taylor on the cover with her new passion, Richard Burton, under the banner headline ``Blazing New Page in the Legend of Liz’’. Warhol chose images from this article to create several works of the actress in a retrospective vein from an early photograph of her role in National Velvet to a still from the upcoming movie Cleopatra, for which the actress was receiving the unprecedented salary of one million dollars. The most arresting image Warhol used was a group photograph of Liz, her third husband Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds at the Epsom Downs horse race prior to the scandalous intrigue of her romance with Eddie. In October-November 1962, Warhol used this image in four paintings all titled The Men in Her Life, memorializing this period as a preamble to the red-hot intensity of the publicity machine that was thriving on her tempestuous – and extremely public - affair with Burton. While Cleopatra would become notorious for its lavish budget and protracted production over years, its reception on its release in 1963 was cool and unforgiving, as opposed to the career-enhancing publicity of the Burton-Taylor scandal.

In the summer of 1963, Taylor’s role as an icon of luxury, decadence, sexuality and celebrity was at its height, when Warhol chose a publicity shot of the actress in the late 1950s to match the iconic pose he was using in his silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe’s studio publicity shot. As in the case of Monroe, Warhol sought to capture her physical attributes – her public mask of hair and makeup – rather than a biographical or career moment. At first, Warhol screened this image over silver backgrounds in the summer of 1963, at the same time he was screening his Silver Elvis paintings, and both series were shown at the Ferus Gallery in October 1963. However in October-November 1963, Warhol soon moved to the multi-colored backgrounds that he was using for his 20 by 16 inch Marilyn paintings of late 1962.  With his Liz portraits, Warhol inaugurated the most classic format for his modern muses – the 40 by 40 inch canvases in which his goddess is centrally placed and evenly balanced. Set against bold colors, the thirteen Colored Liz paintings command our attention and seduce our senses. The Marilyn and Jackie paintings in this format followed in the summer of 1964. Like modern-day Madonnas, the images of these three women were refined down to their basic attributes contrasted dramatically against brilliant colored backgrounds; in the case of Liz Taylor, her abundant dark hair, her brilliantly hued eyes, her perfectly arched brow and her voluptuous red lips were the signs of her immortality as a public image.

The surface of the present work is impeccable: a perfect marriage of the crisp registration one finds in the clean silkscreen with the saturated naphthol red light background that pushes the silhouette out of the pictorial space. Only in the most important of Warhol’s works do we see the artist so lovingly devoted to the actual mechanics of his craft, and thus to the overall physical properties of the painting itself. Having been with the same owner since 1965, the condition of the surface is remarkable, so that the red color has retained its original vitality and incandescence. The playful meanings one finds between the subject, her status and the way such a color amplifies the spectra of these meanings are, of course, further enhanced by the outstanding quality of the present work’s surface. The message is very much carried by Warhol’s media here, yet we are still mesmerized by the sheer simplicity and beauty of the picture before us. In this sense, Warhol’s new ‘icons’ work much in the same way as old icons did – seducing the viewer with the magnificent array of media used in its construction.

From the very first moment one encounters this painting, one is seduced by the bright, electrified hue of scarlet that bursts forth from the surface. It seeps into the sitter’s hair, displaying pyrotechnics of color and screen that animate what would otherwise be a relatively nondescript passage of description. This red color forms a line that follows the outline of the left-hand side of the sitter’s face, hair and neck, channeling its way down her visage, affording a separation between the clean black of the hair and the light pink of her flesh tones. It is only in this example of the thirteen Colored Liz paintings that we find such a strong color line, so clearly defined, separating these physiognomic fields. The color is employed, once more, to suggest the lusciousness of the film star’s lips. Punctuating these bold passages are the shocking turquoise of her eye-shadow as well as the famous violet blue tones of her eyes.

This strong chromatic field sets the stage upon which the star herself is realized. Warhol’s silkscreen technique, still a relatively new phenomenon to him in 1963, is beautifully executed here. There is a wonderful balance between the crisp record of the overall form, together with softer, more subtle areas of screen that shape the shadows around her nose, cheek and neck. One finds in this series of Colored Liz paintings a more confident Warhol with the silkscreen. The early experiments had been made, and now he wished to explore the various nuances this new technique presented to him.

Liz powerfully sums up the extraordinary contribution Warhol made to the lexis and praxis of art. An image of a film star, purloined from a publicity photograph, becomes indexical not just of the vagaries of life and death, but also of the questions of beauty, and how society embraces and nurtures such a dynamic. The aesthetic and the conceptual are thus inextricably linked, revealing Warhol’s focus on searching questions of how and why celebrity matters. Moreover, underpinning any visual or intellectual reward we garner from Liz, are the extraordinary technical achievements Warhol made, here perfecting the silkscreen technique, enabling it to create astonishing works that are intellectually arresting yet, ultimately, visual feasts.