Andy Warhol

 "I expected to see Avedon or somebody like that, instead we went to one of those places on Forty-second Street where you put a quarter in a machine and take three pictures. We kept two booths going for an hour" (Ethel Scull cited in Georg Frei and Neil Prinz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. I, Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, New York 2002, p. 410).

Executed in June-July 1963, Ethel Scull is a pivotal work in Andy Warhol's breakthrough of Pop Art. Among the best known of his early Pop portraits, it is significantly the first screen-printed portrait based on photo-booth images, directly prefiguring his first self portrait commissioned by Florence Barron later that year. Moreover, his experimentation with colour in this rare polychrome screen altered the way Warhol used colour and seriality in his subsequent works, lending a fascinating insight into a key development in his oeuvre.

Ethel Scull and her entrepreneur husband Robert, who commissioned the portrait, are generally associated with being pioneering collector of Pop Art and built one of the most important collections throughout the 1960s. In part financed by a successful taxi fleet known as the 'Scull's Angels', the duo were among the first collectors of Warhol's work. Newly wealthy and suddenly famous, Scull was an ideal subject for Warhol's art: as with his earlier images of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, the present work is less a record of the prose of physical likeness and more a depiction of Warhol's love affair with the drama and glamour of celebrity itself.

Having accepted the commission, Warhol arranged to take Scull not to a professional photographer but to a mechanical photo-booth. Warhol had previously used photo-booth images for a photographic commission for Harper's Bazaar in June 1963 entitled 'New Faces, New Forces, New Names in the Arts', but as Gerard Malanga has stated, this was probably the first time that Warhol had used the photo strips as the basis for his paintings. This is a technique that he employed up until the Holly Solomon portrait in 1966 and which later evolved into the use of Polaroid photographs for the commissioned portraits in the 1970s and 1980s. From more than three hundred shots that were taken that day, Warhol selected thirty-five for this seminal work. He enlarged them, and silk-screened each onto a prepared coloured canvas to create one of his breakthrough early paintings: Ethel Scull 36 Times, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The present large canvas, a prototype for the final commission, incorporates eight of these shots, the vertical format ostensibly reproducing two of the strips from the photomat machine. What is so unusual about the present work is the five-tone 'rainbow' screen which charts a decisive shift in the way Warhol structured serial images. Until this point, Warhol's large serial works - from the Soup Cans to the Death and Disaster paintings - had reiterated repeated motifs across a single colour ground. Acutely aware of the ability of different colours to animate his subjects, in the present work Warhol experiments - apparently for the first time - with a polychrome screen on a white ground. There are earlier examples of screens of different colours superimposed one on top of the other, for example in his multicoloured depiction of the Mona Lisa, however this is the first time we see a single variegated screen inked up in five different hues. Warhol's experimentation with this rich chromatic display in Ethel Scull evolved into the technique of working on generally smaller canvases of various colours, which could be produced as individual units in a series or assembled into multi-panel compositions. Working in a series in this way allowed Warhol to produce more extensive bodies of work in which he could push the given image to its limit, experimenting with different crops, different configurations and most importantly different colours. Devised and used for the first time in the pivotal Ethel Scull commission, this new approach was to become the basis for many of the series that Warhol produced at the Factory, most notably the Jackie Paintings and the Flowers paintings.

While the present portrait appears initially to be made from a straightforward enlargement of two unmodified photo strips, examination of the mechanical used to create the screen reveals how Warhol, the original architect of seriality in art, cut and paste individual frames onto the base strip, deftly readjusting his images to uncover through repetition the different nuances and permutations of his sitter's character. Warhol is ingenious in his method of subtly enhancing his imagery, either by accident or design, creating an extra sensitivity through repetition while still preserving the freshness and spontaneity implied by the photomat technique. The photo-booth provided a portrait image with strong contrasts, thanks to the the flash aimed directly at the face which ironed out particular characteristics, smoothing over the features and bleaching away mid-tones. Warhol was well aware of the artistic potential to be exploited from this contrast, the starkness of the black and white being especially conducive for conversion to his still new silkscreen process.

With her stylish shoulder-length hair and long glossy nails, Scull is the epitome of 1960s cool. Masked by large round sunglasses prescient of those worn by Warhol his subsequent photo-booth self-portrait, Scull appears in turn sultry, silly, exhilarated and sombre. She looks like a star who is perfectly at ease in front of the camera, willingly and coyly playing up to the lens. At the time she was at the pinnacle of high society and Warhol's attempt to depict her beauty is sandwiched between his earlier paintings of Marilyn and Liz and those of Jackie Kennedy in 1964. In all of these works Warhol accentuated the power of the feminine, emphasising the beauty of these iconic figures and turning his vision of them into icons in their own right.