Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s fascination with money recurred many times in his career.  First appearing in his early drawings of dollar bills stuffed into soup cans and then within his black and white advertisement paintings, Warhol used the dollar bill as the subject for his groundbreaking fist series of silk-screened images on canvas in 1962.  Over the next twenty years the world and Pop Art would continue to progress.  From his days as a celebrated illustrator producing print ads, Warhol’s obsession with the commercial culture of America would continue to grow and guide his artistic vision.  

By the 1980s, with the bullish market and the undeniable fascination with accumulating wealth, money had become one of the most powerful and sexy objects imaginable.  By far the most ostentatious and flagrantly capitalistic of all Warhol’s explorations into the theme of money, his serial treatment of the dollar sign provides the ultimate expression of a lifetime infatuation with consumerism.  Seen as an extreme capitalist society, America is here reduced by Warhol to one signifier – the symbol of our currency – connoting sex, power and status in the most banal of fashions.  In true Pop art fashion, Warhol appropriated this lowly symbol from everyday life and elevated it to iconic status by turning it into Art.

Perfectly in tune with American culture and anticipating (even driving) trends and fashions, Warhol’s dollar paintings, like his portraits of Marilyn and Elvis, are all about desire.  Dollar Signs were first exhibited with Leo Castelli at his Greene Street gallery in 1982, the dawning of the Decade of Excess.  The present work displays an alluring array of cheerful colors on which the dollar sign pulsates.  The picture radiates with an optimistic aura reflecting a society’s naïve belief in the American Dream.  America’s perennial love affair with money and it as a sign of comeuppance perfectly embodies the philosophy of Andy Warhol himself.   Hidden beneath the bright veneer of lively colors, the $ contains Warhol’s satirical commentary on the dark side of American materialism, as you are quite literally hanging money on the wall.