Andy Warhol

Estate of Andy Warhol
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in excellent condition. The colors are vibrant and the canvas is well stretched. There are scattered unobtrusive spots of paint accumulation which is inherent to the artist's working method. Under ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of inpainting. Framed.
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An artist with a penchant for paradox, Warhol's oeuvre was birthed from the deep-seeded ironies in America culture. Wrought with contradictions, his work tackles everything from the banality in sex to the romance in death. In the present work, one of the most vibrant examples in his early 1980's series Guns, the viewer is faced with gleaming silver barrels, blood red cartridges and jet black triggers which create a composition epitomizing tragic Warholian glamour.

The Guns series came at the end of a long artistic preoccupation with death and disaster which explored not only car crashes and electric chairs but also life's more discrete catastrophes. Though often criticized for bringing to race riots the same detachment he brought to soup cans and starlets, Warhol's voyeuristic passivity was not a measure of apathy but rather a reflection of what he saw as an anesthetized public. "...When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn't really have any effect." (Warhol, 142)

A master of multiplicity, Warhol's repeated imagery whether it was guns or Kennedys, seemed to comment on America's tendency to shrug at both glamour and calamity. The photograph of Jackie Kennedy in the few moments following her husband's assassination loses its ability to shock not only because of its bright blue backdrop but because we have seen that image so many times, become numb to its meaning.  Indeed, Guns' tantalizing weaponry falls right in step with both American ideology and Warholian critique. The allure and mystique of destruction epitomizes the artist's life-long dialogue with morality as well the American fascination with all that glitters, and as seen in his portraits, when death coincided with beauty, Warhol did his best work.