Andy Warhol

Stable Gallery, New York
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #75)
The Sonnabend Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center, An American Viewpoint, December 1963 - January 1964, cat. no. 19 (as Liz #1)
Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Campo Vitale: mostra internazionale d'arte contemporanea, July - October 1967, cat. no. 253 (as Liz n. 2) 
London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Obsessive Image, April - May 1968, cat. no. 103
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, New-Dada e Pop Art Newyorkesi, April - May 1969, cat. no. 71 (as Liz (Jaune), and in error a different Liz was illustrated)
Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Extended Loan, May 1982 - March 2005
Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Sammlung Sonnabend: Von der Pop-art bis heute, February - May 1996, p. 79, illustrated in color 
Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung and Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Amerika-Europa, 1996, cat. no. 11, illustrated in color
Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró, Andy Warhol: 1960 - 1986, September - December 1996, cat. no. 12, p. 79, illustrated in color
St.-Priest-en-Jarez, Musée d’art Moderne de Saint Étienne, Sonnabend Collection, May - June 1998
Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum für moderne kunst, Andy Warhol Og Hans Verden, April - July 2000, cat. no. 8, p. 23, illustrated in color (as Early Colored Liz)
Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Andy Warhol: Series and Singles, September - December 2000, cat. no. 34, p. 88, illustrated in color
Saratoga Springs, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College; Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum, From Pop to Now: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection, June 2002 - May 2003, p. 29, illustrated in color (as Early Liz (Chartreuse))
Las Vegas, Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, American Pop Icons, May - November 2003, pl. 25, p. 73, illustrated in color and p. 118, illustrated in color
Milan, Triennale di Milano, The Andy Warhol Show, September 2004 - January 2005, cat. no. 13, p. 91, illustrated in color (as Early Colored Liz (Chartreuse))
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection, January - February 2009, p. 57, illustrated in color
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, Andy Warhol: The Early Sixties, Paintings and Drawings 1961-1964, September 2010 - January 2011, cat. no. 40, p. 163, illustrated in color  
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Warhol Liz, September - October 2011, p. 81, illustrated in color

Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, no. 85 
Rainer Crone, Das Bildernerische Werk Andy Warhols, Berlin, 1976, no. 94
Exh. Cat., Zurich, Kunsthaus (and travelling), Andy Warhol, 1978, p. 85, illustrated in color (as Early Colored Liz)
Georg Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, Vol. 01, New York, 2002, cat. no. 529, p. 453, illustrated in color 
Andy Warhol "Giant" Size, New York and London, 2006, p. 201, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a metal strip frame with a small float, which fits into a blond wood frame with larger float and Plexiglas.
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.

Andy Warhol’s magnificent Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz), executed between October and November 1963, is one of a rare series of Elizabeth Taylor produced by the master of Pop Art on colored backgrounds. This series of jewel-toned portrait paintings represents the apotheosis of Warhol’s ground-breaking creative vision, both as the technician of the (still then) revolutionary silkscreen process and the architect of iconic visual treatises on the modern vagaries of celebrity. This luminous portrait not only captures the ironically dark essence of Twentieth Century glamour and fame, it also speaks of a time of growing fame for Warhol himself. The numerical title of Liz #1 originates from the first exhibition of this series at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, where six of the colored Liz paintings appeared in a December 1963 show fittingly titled An American Viewpoint. Most importantly, it resided for several decades in the illustrious Sonnabend Collection, along with Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz) and Four Marilyns of 1962, both on turquoise grounds, among many other masterpieces of Pop Art. Ileana Sonnabend and her former husband Leo Castelli each held important exhibitions for Warhol in the months following the creation of Liz #1 - the Death and Disaster paintings at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris in January and the Flower paintings in New York at the Castelli Gallery in November - December 1964.

As with his images of Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy, Warhol’s depictions of Elizabeth Taylor display not so much his ambition to record the prose of physical likeness, but more his love affair with the drama and glamour of celebrity. For Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor was much more than just a celebrated actress. She was the survivor of a near fatal illness, a goddess of the silver screen and the grand embodiment of the trinity of mortality, celebrity and fame which so fascinated the artist. Warhol’s deep involvement with the image of Elizabeth Taylor appeared very early in his career, beginning with his Death and Disaster paintings. When Warhol was still largely painting his canvases by hand, he borrowed subject matter from the front pages of tabloids and newspapers, beginning in 1961. Warhol’s second and largest "headline’’ painting, Daily News (1962), was based on the front and back pages of a March 29, 1962 newspaper with the front page headline "Eddie Fisher Breaks Down: In Hospital Here, Liz in Rome." For Warhol, tabloid papers were either vehicles for mass disaster, rendering tragic circumstances almost mundane by their commonplace repetition, or the purveyors of celebrity and fame to an avid audience. In figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy, Warhol found the ideal subjects that combined both aspects of the mass media culture where accessibility turned private tragedy into public myth. By isolating and then serializing such images, Warhol began the practice of essentially commodifying celebrity, just as he had earlier catalogued the darker side of life with his various images of car crashes, race riots and electric chairs. This, in turn, would affect a later generation of artists, most notably Jeff Koons, whose work seems to celebrate the Warholian process of ‘commodification’.

In the early 1960s, Liz Taylor had emerged from a string of successful films that signaled her complete transformation from the child star of National Velvet (1944) to the heated sex symbol of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and Butterfield 8 (1960). Often, Taylor’s personal life superceded her professional accomplishments as the public passionately followed her early marriages, the tragic death of her third husband Mike Todd and her role as the other woman in the break-up of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds’ marriage – all before the actress had turned 30. Most tellingly for Warhol, the young voluptuous woman had a dramatic brush with early death. After begrudgingly playing the prostitute role in Butterfield 8, Taylor traveled to London in 1960 with her then husband Fisher to begin filming Cleopatra. While there, the actress suffered from a near-fatal respiratory illness during which she was actually briefly pronounced dead, finally recovering after an emergency tracheotomy. While Taylor had been acknowledged by critics and Hollywood with Oscar nominations for two previous roles in the late 1950s, it was her role in Butterfield 8 that garnered the actress her first Academy Award. The sympathy engendered by her operation and illness was perceived as a factor in her award, as her scar was visibly apparent on the night of the ceremonies.

This combination of glamour and tragedy appealed to Warhol’s fascination with fame and his own deep sense of morbidity, and in 1962 the personae of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor would become Warhol’s ultimate muses in establishing iconic symbols of popular culture. While his series of colored Marilyn paintings were inspired by the shocking news of Monroe’s suicide in August 1962, Warhol’s focus on Elizabeth Taylor was generated from a ten page feature on her marital history and career in the April 13, 1962 issue of Life, portraying Taylor on the cover with her new passion, Richard Burton, under the banner headline "Blazing New Page in the Legend of Liz." Warhol chose images from this article to create several works of the actress in a retrospective vein from an early photograph of her role in National Velvet to a still from the upcoming movie Cleopatra, for which the actress was receiving the unprecedented salary of one million dollars. The most arresting image Warhol used was a group photograph of Liz, her third husband Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds at the Epsom Downs horse race prior to the scandalous intrigue of her romance with Eddie. In October-November 1962, Warhol used this image in four paintings all titled The Men in Her Life, memorializing this period as a preamble to the red-hot intensity of the publicity machine that was thriving on her tempestuous - and extremely public - affair with Burton. While Cleopatra would become notorious for its lavish budget and protracted production over years, its reception on its release in 1963 was cool and unforgiving as opposed to the career-enhancing publicity of the Burton-Taylor scandal.

In the summer of 1963, Taylor’s role as an icon of luxury, decadence, sexuality and celebrity was at its height, when Warhol chose a publicity shot of the actress in the late 1950s to match the iconic pose he was using in his silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe’s studio publicity shot. As in the case of Monroe, Warhol sought to capture her physical attributes – her public mask of hair and makeup – rather than a biographical or career moment. At first, Warhol screened this image over silver backgrounds in the summer of 1963, at the same time he was screening his Silver Elvis paintings, and both series were shown at the Ferus Gallery in October 1963. However in October-November 1963, Warhol soon moved to the multi-colored backgrounds that he was using for his 20 by 16 inch Marilyn paintings of late 1962.  With his Liz portraits, Warhol inaugurated the most classic format for his modern muses – the 40 by 40 inch canvases in which his goddess is centrally placed and evenly balanced. Set against bold colors, the thirteen Colored Liz paintings command our attention and seduce our senses. The Marilyn and Jackie paintings in this format followed in the summer of 1964. Like modern-day Madonnas, the images of these three women were refined down to their basic attributes contrasted dramatically against brilliant colored backgrounds; in the case of Liz Taylor, her abundant dark hair, her brilliantly hued eyes, her perfectly arched brow and her voluptuous red lips were the signs of her immortality as a public image.

From the very first moment one encounters this painting, one is seduced by the bright, electrified yellow hue that bursts from the surface. It seeps into the sitter’s hair, displaying pyrotechnics of color and screen. Punctuating these bold passages are the shocking turquoise of her eye-shadow as well as the famous blue tones of her eyes. This strong chromatic field sets the stage upon which the star herself is realized. Warhol’s silkscreen technique, still a relatively new phenomenon to him in 1963, is beautifully executed here. There is a wonderful balance between the crisp record of the overall form, together with softer, more subtle areas of screen that shape the shadows around her nose, cheek and neck. One finds in this series of Colored Liz paintings a more confident Warhol with the silkscreen. The early experiments had been made, and now he wished to explore the various nuances this new technique presented to him.

Liz #1 powerfully sums up the extraordinary contribution Warhol made to the lexis and praxis of art. An image of a film star, purloined from a publicity photograph, becomes iconic not just of the vagaries of life and death, but also of the questions of beauty, and how society embraces and nurtures such a dynamic. The aesthetic and the conceptual are thus inextricably linked, revealing Warhol’s focus on searching questions of how and why celebrity matters. Moreover, underpinning the visual and intellectual rewards we garner from Liz #1, the extraordinary technical achievement Warhol made, here perfected in the silkscreen technique, creates an astonishing work that truly broadcasts the essence of an icon.