Andy Warhol

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

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although it fails to convey the sparkling nature of the diamond dust visible in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All four edges are slightly deckled. The sheet is attached verso to the plexiglass in several places. The diamond dust has scattered across the surface, sometimes outside of its prescribed areas.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

In many ways, the art of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys could not be more different: Warhol, the king of Pop art and the ultimate icon of American consumerism, and Beuys, a German conceptual artist, shaman and devoted socialist. Warhol’s paintings captured the pinnacle of American capitalism, which Beuys seemingly rejected in his most iconic performance, ironically titled I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). It is to the credit of both artists that they were able to look beyond the appearance of this superficial differentiation, and understand that on a more profound level, their practices were not mutually exclusive or even contradictory.

From the early years onwards, Andy Warhol’s reflections on American culture have been somewhat ambiguous – his iconic Death and Disaster series clearly demonstrated that he was interested in the human experience of our image-saturated contemporary society, but equally in the visually striking aesthetics of popular culture. Joseph Beuys must have recognised the visionary quality in these works, since the two artists became good friends and Warhol made a celebrated series of Joseph Beuys portraits. Beuys, in return, produced a striking photograph of the two artists holding hands in front of a lion sculpture in Italy (illustrated here). The affection Warhol felt for the German artist was recorded when he intimately described his encounter with the artist in Naples, on March 31, 1980: “We went back to the hotel to meet Joseph Beuys and then we had dinner with Beuys and his family at some funny little Italian restaurant. He was sweet. Really a lot of fun” (Pat Hackett, Ed., The Andy Warhol Diaries, London 2010, p. 383).

Beautifully executed on a black background and covered with diamond dust, Andy Warhol has silk-screened the portrait of his artist friend fifteen times onto the surface of the present work. Reminiscent of his early interest in repetition as a strategy that replicates the effect of reproducible technologies, the painting is a powerful portrait of Joseph Beuys that captures Warhol’s unique and lasting impact on contemporary art, and remains as an intimate document of the unlikely friendship between two of the most influential artists of the Post War era.