Andy Warhol

Bob Colacello, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Christie's, New York, Twentieth Century Art, 13 May 1998, Lot 405
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Painted at the dawn of the 1980s, the decade which ushered in a new climate of financial prosperity, Warhol's iconic Dollar Signs present the ultimate expression of his lifelong fascination with consumerism. One of the artist's great late series, they show him returning to the theme of money that he had first explored in his pioneering silk-screened dollar bills from 1962. While the majority of works in the series isolated a single dollar, in the present example the motif is reiterated across the horizontal format echoing his serial images of the 1960s, its replication laying bare the consumerist impulse driving modern society.

Like Warhol's first Pop paintings which examined the relationship between big business advertising and the common man through enlarged icons of consumerism like Coca-Cola and Campbell's soup, Warhol here similarly takes the currency of this relationship and brusquely presents it with all the brazen euphoria synonymous with advancing consumerism. No longer taking the entire bill as a subject but instead focusing on the unabashed icon of money - the totemic, isolated '$' - Warhol hones in on one of the most universally recognised logos in the world and an international denominator of wealth.

This, Warhol's last series of money paintings, metaphorically reveals that by 1981, Pop art was a historical triumph and an entrenched cultural phenomenon. They mirror his larger-than-life, personal exuberance and surpass mere pictorial depiction to become a form of cultural currency in themselves. With its brash palette, this is one of Warhol's most ostentatious and flagrantly capitalistic explorations into the theme. Tantalising and full of promise, it is like a shrine to wealth. Gleaming with the sparkling promise of a new era of prosperity, it dramatically prefigures the atmosphere of exuberance and extravagance that characterised the cash-rich art world of the ensuing decade.