Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC#s 79, 115, 121 and 153)
Dayton's Gallery 12, Minneapolis
Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, Important Post-War and Contemporary Art, November 17, 1971, lot 46
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above)
Sotheby's New York, October 7, 1987, lot 73
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum; Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; London, Tate Gallery; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andy Warhol, May 1970 - June 1971 (multi-color and all pink panels only)

George Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture 1964 - 1969, vol. 2A, London, 2004, p. 302 (text reference for LC#s 79, 115, 121 and 153)

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This work is framed in a brushed aluminum thin strip frame.
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An everlasting image of twentieth-century art, Flowers, executed in 1964 is part of the series that was the chosen subject for Andy Warhol's first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Having left the Stable Gallery, Warhol spent the summer of 1964 preparing for his inaugural show at Castelli, which was scheduled for November. Warhol regularly worked in series, preferring to dedicate his gallery exhibitions to a single theme or subject, as epitomized by the seminal exhibition of 32 Cambell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. Warhol's move to Leo Castelli provided the catalyst for a new set of works whose success was so instantaneous that it sold out immediately, and the Flowers quickly became synonymous with the Pop art movement which was rapidly gaining in international credence. Comprised of four 24-inch Flower paintings, the present work is a grid-within-a-grid, including both Warhol's single-color canvases – here white, pink and red -conjoined with a multi-colored Flower in a microcosm of the multi-panelled installation at the Castelli Gallery in November.

Ten days prior to the Castelli exhibition, Warhol delivered 45 Flower paintings in the 24-inch format to the gallery from which 28 were hung in the show in four rows of seven. Three panels of the present work were among this first delivery (LC 72 – 121), while the fourth (the all-white flowers, LC #153) was part of later consignments to Castelli. The previous owner of the present painting was Dayton's Gallery 12 in Minneapolis whose director, Felice Wender, was a close friend and early supporter of Warhol. She lent two of the panels in this painting to the 1970-1971 Pasadena retrospective exhibition of Warhol's work which included a multi-panel installation of 24-inch Flower paintings similar to the Castelli show. Felice Wender is likely to be the one who combined the four panels into one work when, shortly after the retrospective, Dayton's Gallery 12 consigned Flowers to Parke Bernet Galleries in November 1971.

Warhol appropriated his source image from a color photograph of seven hibiscus blossoms printed as a fold-out in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography, intended to illustrate the varying visual effect of different exposure times and filter settings. No doubt the seriality of the images held appeal for Warhol whose paintings of soup cans, coke bottles and celebrity portraits had expanded into monumental masterpieces of repetitive imagery with an almost filmic quality. Warhol's stated premise was to create art in an almost mechanical way, removing trace of the artist's hand from his production processes. However the artist is still very present in Warhol's work if only by the conscious will of aesthetic choice, and in the Flower series, it was through a sequence of interventions and manipulations – cropping the image and rotating one of the flowers 180 degrees – that Warhol derived his final composition. The square format of the individual panels and the overall make-up of the present work, appealed because of the range of orientations that it affords: "I like painting on a square because you don't have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it's just a square." (as quoted in David Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 191)

The multi-panel installation at Leo Castelli exploited these factors to its full pictorial potential, arranging the canvases like tesserae on the walls to elicit subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases. The curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialized the rectilinear grid-like structure created by the gaps between the canvases. The orientation of the flower composition was not consistent throughout the four rows of 28 panels exhibited at Castelli or later at the Pasadena Art Museum, giving an early sign that Warhol felt the orientation could be variable as in the present Flowers.

Between June and September of 1964, Warhol's studio – the Factory – was a production line for Flower paintings of different sizes. Throughout this phase of his artistic development, Warhol pioneered and refined the screenprinting process that he had made his own. The first artist to make extensive use of the still revolutionary process, Warhol was attracted to the connotations of mass production and the effacing of the hand of the artist. The production underwent three phases: firstly, the forms of the flowers were stencilled and the colored paints were applied by hand onto the primed canvas; once dry, the flowers were masked and the green acrylic of the surrounding ground was applied with a wide brush; finally, the screenprint image was applied over the dried image. Over the course of painting this series of images, Warhol's choice of paints would also include the more fluorescent Day-glo colors seen in the multi-colored panel in Flowers.

The idea to make flowers the subject of a major series was apparently suggested to Warhol by Henry Geldzahler, then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. By choosing to depict the motif of flowers, Warhol was wilfully engaging with an established canon of still-life painting stretching back centuries: "In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we're doing my Flower period! Like Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's flowers, the genre." (Gerard Malanga as cited in A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York, 2003, p. 74).Warhol's interpretation of this motif, however, is consciously banal and synthetic: in the first instance he rejects the intricate compositions of the Dutch still-life tradition in favour of an overhead perspective which banishes the horizon and flattens the shape of each petal; secondly, the complex color harmonies of, say, Monet's water lilies are dispensed with in favour of planar zones of flat color. Indeed, throughout the series, Warhol chose synthetic, unnatural colors whose artificial hues belied their manufactured plasticity. As was his usual practice, when Warhol converted the original color photograph into a two tone screen, he radically heightened the contrast of the original image. In effect, the minute details are lost and the forms become increasingly abstract. As a result, the Flower paintings are the most abstract works that Warhol produced in the 1960s.

After the Death and Disaster series of 1962-1963 which depicted sensational images of electric chairs, suicides and horrendous car crashes, the motif of four blossoming hibiscus flowers appears almost as a palliative to the violence of the previous imagery. Despite its apparent decorative quality, however, which doubtless appealed to Warhol in his program to make a truly popular art form, the motif is laced with the tragedy and morbidity that permeates Warhol's oeuvre. Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, the motif of the flourishing hibiscus serves as a metaphor for the brevity of celebrity. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as a metaphor for the frailty of life, a haunting contemplation of death that is never far removed from Warhol's work.