Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
Private Collection, England
Peter Gwyther Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1995

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is extremely light wear to the top and lower right corner tips with intermittent tension cracks along the vertical edges. Upon close inspection, there is a tiny media accretion at the centre left of the figures forehead and another at the centre of the top right quadrant. There are some slight irregularities to the red pigment, however, this appears to be inherent to the artist's screening method and original to the works execution. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Completed in late 1986, the Lenin Series, of which the present lot is part, was to be the last body of work that Andy Warhol created. Dying only two months after its completion and just before it was first exhibited in Munich at Galerie Bernard Klüser, the series encapsulation of the deified image of the Communist leader within an art form that fetishized consumerist objects is a wonderfully subversive testament to Warhol's unwavering aptitude. 

 

In early 1985, the Bernard Klüser showed Warhol a tattered black and white photograph that had been bought in Rome. It depicted the Bolshevik revolutionary in a tightly shot composition; the sitter confronting the viewer with stern self-assurance, his hands tactically resting upon a pile of books to relay his occupation as an intellectual political theorist. The strict formal economy of the photograph was heightened by the strong contrast between the dark background and the light face, hands and cuffs of Lenin, creating an image of stark simplicity that was soon to become a global image of a man loaded with meaning.

 

As with all of Warhol's best work, the Lenin Series highlights the artist's talent not only his in choice of an exceptionally strong and resounding source image, but also his unique ability to preserve the character of the original photograph while simultaneously undermining the viewer's expectation through the play of colour, depth and other modifications to the original details.  Here, aligning these elements with distinctive precision, Warhol claims the readymade political icon already weighted with historical cult celebrity and notoriety, and as he famously did with so many other cultural figureheads, makes it irrefutably Warholian. Warhol intensifies Lenin's reticent stare, emphasising shadows in the sitter's face that are barely visible in the original, and flattens the foreground and the background into a single plane of colour.  The sobriety of the image finds energetic release in the bright red hues of the surface pigment. Instantaneously the viewer sees that while the range of colour is reduced, the red, coupled with the clear, broad and purposeful use of line that frame and accent the head, hands and cuffs, abstracts the image from the radically sombre tones of the source photograph, and the expected depiction of a man who usually commands an aura of gravitas. By warping the dignity and clarity of the original, Warhol demotes destabilises the notion of Lenin the revolutionary and renders him instead as innocuous as Marilyn Monroe.