Andy Warhol

Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples
Waddington Galleries, London (acquired from the above in 1980)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1986

This painting is in excellent condition. The canvas is unframed. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"For those who witnessed [Warhol and Beuys] approaching each other across the polished granite floor, the moment had all the ceremonial aura of two rival popes meeting in Avignon" (David Galloway, "Beuys and Warhol: Aftershocks," Art in America, July 1988, p. 121).

Andy Warhol's vast and mesmerizing depiction of the ultimate artistic shaman of twentieth-century Europe, Joseph Beuys, 1980 is from a group of portraits generated after the two met at Beuys' major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in November 1979. The shimmering resplendence of diamond dust demarcates the unmistakable drawn cheeks and ceaselessly quizzical eyes of an artist who had spent over thirty years redefining the very boundaries of art. Indeed, this portrait exactly crystallizes that tireless curiosity that drove Beuys' groundbreaking achievements. It is difficult to conceive of a more iconic or artistically self-referential painting from the Twentieth Century, or one that more wholly encompasses the radical advancements in post-war transatlantic art history. Warhol, the progenitor of Pop and subsequent catalyst of a new cultural age, and Beuys, the ideologue radical who didactically transformed the landscape of the performance and the conceptual in art, are sublimely conflated in this monumental eulogy to both their talents.

The two had first met in Hans Mayer's gallery in Düsseldorf on 18^th May 1979, an event described by an American reporter: "For those who witnessed the two approaching each other across the polished granite floor, the moment had all the ceremonial aura of two rival popes meeting in Avignon" (David Galloway, "Beuys and Warhol: Aftershocks," Art in America, July 1988, p. 121). However, it was during Beuys' spectacular exhibition in New York that November that the idea for this work was initiated. Heiner Bastian, the renowned critic and emphatic sponsor of both Warhol and Beuys' artistic eminence, persuaded Warhol to invite Beuys to the Factory and, over lunch, suggested that Warhol paint Beuys' portrait. In keeping with his then current practice, Warhol took a sequence of Polaroid photographs of the German artist and the present work results from the tonal inversion of one of those images. It is thus akin to a photographic negative, which is ironically the singularly absent feature of the Polaroid image-making process. Warhol had first used diamond dust, actually a form of ground glass sourced by his assistant Ronnie Cutrone, in his 'Shadow' paintings of 1979, where it invested these semi-abstract works with layers of ambiguity via its reflection of light within the depiction of a shadow. 

Joseph Beuys was conceived at the dawn of a new decade that also ushered in a new Warhol as an artist who was growing increasingly retrospective. Once the sovereign chronicler of the 60s cult of mass media and glossy celebrity, by this time Warhol focused on more targeted psychological subjects. The sober visage in the so-called 'Fright Wig' self portraits of 1986 has a clear precursor in Joseph Beuys: both confront the viewer with an unblinking stare and stark physiognomy. The fluorescent flashiness of his 1970s celebrity portraiture is replaced by a more direct interest in the sitter's humanity: the focus shifts to the subjects' inner essence as opposed to pure superficiality. The glitzy, shimmering effect of the diamond dust initially strikes us as scintillating, but it can as easily be read as a commentary on the superficiality of modern life with its obsession with glamour and extravagance. As David Bourdon has commented Warhol's "snapshots of Beuys' gauntly poetic face...flecked with glittery diamond dust" further the psychological intensity of the portrait: "By reversing the lights and the darks, Warhol conveyed some of the elusive character of the mystifying German artist" (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p.385). In his habitual uniform of felt hat and sleeveless jacket, Beuys is here broadcast as the mystical persona that he had fashioned for himself. By reversing the image and 'sculpting' the face with diamond dust, Warhol's image is an implicit tribute to the self-consciously elusive Beuys' phenomenon.

The individual approaches of Warhol and Beuys shared an innate understanding of the authority of new materials and techniques as well as alternatives to traditional readings of artistic hierarchies. Nevertheless these two high-priests of highly separate, though not necessarily opposed, systems of art-making created radically differing oeuvres. Finally this portrait should also be considered in the context of a cordial, if somewhat wary and unlikely friendship. This is characterized by an anecdotal entry in Warhol's diary from later in 1981: "Beuys...gave me a work of art which was two bottles of effervescent water which ended up exploding in my suitcase and damaging everything I have, so I can't open the box now, because I don't know if it's a work of art anymore or just broken bottles. So if he comes to New York I've got to get him to come and sign the box because it's just a real muck" (the artist cited in: Pat Hackett, Ed., The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 361).