Andy Warhol

Stable Gallery, New York
Joseph Adamec, New York
Private Collection, New York
Sotheby's New York, November 9, 2005, lot 2
Private Collection, London
Christie's, London, Double Vision, October 14, 2007, lot 15
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, cat. no. 437
Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York, 1976, cat. no. 786
George Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I: Paintings and Sculpture 1961 - 1963, New York, 2002, cat. no. 113, p. 125, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The painting is framed in dark wood strip frame with a silver face and a float.
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.
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Air Mail Stamps by Andy Warhol is one of a rare group of six early paintings from 1962 that depict sheets of multiple stamps and mark the very beginnings of the artistic enterprise that gave rise to the Pop art movement in the United States. Like few others before him, Warhol would succeed in subverting the heroic ideals of Modernist abstract painting and add the most fuel to the century's most prolonged and fruitful conceptual dialogue. Continuing the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Contemporary art would question what  constitutes "high'' versus ``low'' culture, and Warhol was the master at challenging the distinction between the fine art destined for museums as opposed to the commercial advertising and media imagery that pervades our daily lives.  A mastermind of iconography, Warhol appropriated everyday imagery as the subject matter for his paintings. In the process, he revolutionized American art of the time by restoring representation and objective imagery to painting in the startling guise of common, everyday objects such as Campbell's Soup Cans, comics, magazine advertisements and newspaper headlines in late 1961 to early 1962. Air Mail Stamps is also an early declaration of another long-lasting cornerstone of Warhol's aesthetic practice: seriality.  Seeking a form of pure reproduction that was capable of multiple repetitions with great efficiency, Warhol experimented with various techniques to de-personalize the production of his art works while endlessly repeating a single image.  The perforated sheets of S&H Green Stamps and United States postal air mail stamps would prove to be ideal subjects for this endeavor.

Responding to the post-war media and consumerist saturation of American culture, Warhol sought a means of art that would remove the hand of the artist, creating the same sense of distance and disconnect that was emerging in the modern world around him. In 1961-1962, Warhol entered an intensive period of formalist experimentation that would redefine his methods and his subject matter, and result in a grand tectonic shift in the course of 20^th century art. While the photo silkscreen would eventually become the method that most suited the "factory" mode of production that Warhol favored, the techniques by which he arrived at this final option were equally avant-garde. In early 1961, Warhol first projected both text and image from newspaper and advertising sources onto his canvases and proceeded to draw and paint the work by hand. Warhol's previous success as a graphic artist and his wonderful drawings on paper from the early 1960s testify to his deft talent as a draftsman, but to make his mark in the world of fine art, Warhol sought a neutral and overtly "anti-handmade" style in keeping with his desire to portray everyday objects in an almost fetishistic depiction of single isolated images.

Warhol's paintings of Campbell's Soup Cans would be a milestone on the journey toward the silkscreen process and the signature group of works that would bring Warhol his greatest early success when they were exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. Long gone is the gestural physicality embedded in the painted brushstroke of the Abstract Expressionists venerated merely a decade earlier. Painted according to a projected image of the company logo from an envelope, these works are chronologically located at the threshold of Warhol's technical experimentation into the mechanical. Paintings such as Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) introduce the artistic objectivity that characterizes much of the art produced in the last third of the 20^th century. As a factual advertising image, the soup can was the first of many images, including the air mail stamps, that conveys a matrix of consumer relations, an endless capitalist cycle initiated by the seller, who promotes his product or service to a potential buyer, who in turn is expected to readily identify it through the use of a recognizable image. Warhol depicted this network of capitalist exchange by appropriating its most potent advertising symbols, and therein locating them at great distance from issues of artistic intent. Universality was also an essential ingredient, and certainly the federal mail is an omnipresent feature of American life.

With the Soup Can paintings of late 1961 and 1962, Warhol continued to trace the image and methodically paint large portions that betray little trace of brushwork. However, he also replaced the method of projected outlines with the use of stencils in the larger canvases that depicted multiple sequences of soup cans. Most importantly for the present work, Warhol also used carved gum erasers to stamp some of the logo elements such as the fleur-de-lis of the multiple image paintings of soup cans.

In 1962, Warhol created two series of works based on stamps - the US airmail stamp and S&H Green Stamps – transferred by means of the stamping method. The present work is one of 6 paintings on canvas made using the Airmail Stamp image as a serial image. The source for this work is an actual airmail stamp that Warhol received on the envelope of a letter, which was carved into an art-gum eraser that would act as a rubber stamp.  The rubber stamp was then covered in paint and used by Warhol to transfer the image to canvas. Due to the small scale of the original source, these serial works are all smaller in dimension than the repeated compositions made with Warhol's silk-screening process where the image could be manipulated in scale.  Including the present work, four of the serial image Airmail Stamp works are 20 x 16 inches: two in red and two in blue. As such the present work is a rarity in its scale and placement within Warhol's developing technique and signature use of repeated imagery.

During the weeks and months of early 1962, Warhol's experimentations were not a linear progression and the silkscreen method was developing somewhat simultaneously with the stencil and stamp methods. Warhol's series of Dollar Bills were based on screens made from drawings on acetate since the practice of reproducing money from photo-silkscreens is dubious for legal reasons. The use of drawings for the screens was also employed in the paintings of shipping and handling labels, such as Fragile – Handle with Care (1962), as well as the early Coca-Cola brand paintings such as Five Coke Bottles. For these works, the sophistication and precision of Warhol's drawings increased in comparison to the Dollar Bills, lending the paintings a more mechanical and neutral appearance. With each of these methods, Warhol's ultimate aim was the seriality that is in its nascent form with Air Mail Stamps.

With his relentlessly repeating compositions, the artist simultaneously intensified and dulled the originally intended impact and meaning of his images whether celebrity portraits, soup cans, dollar bills or stamps.  Warhol gave such images new iconic status by changing their context and turning them into art objects. His intention was to limit the range of artistic intervention, reducing the creative act to a choice of image and color. The `found' image of the perforated sheets of air mail stamps and the S&H Green stamps was ideal in its inherent repetition. However, of the six serial image paintings of the US postal stamp, the present Air Mail Stamps is unique in one instance of artistic manipulation. Alone among the postal and S & H Green stamps, Air Mail Stamps has inverted images that break the all-over pattern and rigid order. Two stamps, located in the third and fourth row, depict the plane pointed downward, and this re-orientation lends a Warholian wit to this rare gem of a painting.