Andy Warhol

i, iii, v, iv: Heiner Bastian, Paris
O'Hara Gallery, New York
Donald J. Christal, Los Angeles
Sotheby's, New York, November 20, 1996, Lot 241
Private Collection, New York
ii: Private Collection (acquired directly form the artist)
Christie's, New York, November 21, 1996, Lot 177
iv: Private Collection (acquired directly form the artist)
Christie's, New York, November 21, 1996, Lot 178

Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969,  Volume 02B, New York, 2002, nos. 1750, 1756, 1753, 1749, 1747, 1751, illustrated in color

These works are in very good condition. There is a soft protrusion on the center of the canvas on the bottom left. The red flowers hav two minor surface abrasions. Otherwise, the surfaces are in very good condition overall. Under ultraviolet inspection there is no evidence of inpainting. Framed.
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Jewel-like in scale and dynamic in color, Andy Warhol's Six Flowers is a beaming example from this iconic series.  Each petite 5 by 5 inch canvas is meticulously executed, using the same composition of the four hibiscus flowers against a black and white background, yet each uniquely colored.  Employing a rainbow of colors, their petals exhibit vibrant hues of cadmium red, white, yellow, orange and pthalo blue.  Individually, these works are precious models of Warhol's celebrated Flowers series in their own right, however, when grouped together as they are in the present work, they make a bold statement about seriality and repetition in art.  Furthermore, this grouping of six small canvases together recalls the original presentation and exhibition of Warhol's Flowers series when they were first unveiled in 1964-65 at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris and Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. 

The story of the 5 inch Flowers is similar to the 8 and 14 inch series: they left Warhol's Factory in two bulk consignments, one for his exhibition at Sonnabend and the other for his show at Leo Castelli. Unlike the 14 and 18 inch Flowers, none of the 5 inch flowers have green backgrounds.  The local color of the flowers is almost entirely silkscreened over the primed ground.  Not only did this introduce a new colour intensity, but Warhol found that leaving out the green background made the composition more abstract, emphasizing the stylization that had interested Warhol from the beginning of the project.

Ever since the Ethel Scull commission, Warhol found great freedom in working on multiple small canvases that could be rearranged into endless configurations. He particularly liked the square format of the Flowers canvases which denied a fixed upright, thereby affording a range of four potential orientations. Arranging the canvases like tesserae on the walls of the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Warhol elicited subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases, the amorphous curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialising the rectilinear grid-like structure created by the gaps between the canvases. With the smaller 5 inch Flowers, the gaps between the canvases was extremely narrow, creating an almost mosaic effect covering the entire wall. As revealed in an installation photograph of the Sonnabend exhibition, the gallery wall was hung with ninety canvases of this 5 by 5 inch size.  The fact that the six canvases of Six Flowers have remained together is remarkable and rare, and is how Warhol originally intended and wished for his Flowers to be viewed.

Updating the age-old genre of still life, his choice of a vibrant palette is consciously synthetic and an outright rejection of the complex color harmonies normally associated with the genre. In place of painterly illusion, Warhol's choice of unnatural color emphasises their manufactured plasticity. Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, for Warhol the motif of the flourishing hibiscus served as a metaphor for the brevity and unsustainability of celebrity – the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer's gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as a synecdoche for the frailty and fragility of life, a haunting contemplation of death that is never far removed from Warhol's work.