Andy Warhol

Fred Hughes, New York
Heiner Bastian Fine Art, Berlin
Stellan Holm, New York
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1995)
Christie's, New York, November 9, 2005, lot 311
Private Collection

Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Work of Andy Warhol, October - December 2006, p. 85, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. The colors are fresh and vibrant. There is evidence of light wear and handling to the edges, resulting in very minor paint loss at the corners. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
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Andy Warhol’s iconic Skull series, begun in 1976 and from which the present work dates, poignantly exemplifies the artist’s fascination with mortality. Beginning in the 1960s, the fragility of life assumed a powerful role within Warhol’s oeuvre. From his horrific Suicides, Car Crashes and macabre Electric Chair paintings to his celebrated Marilyn portraits that symbolize a life gone too soon, Warhol continuously pursued new iconography that captured the transience of life. However, death became of even greater focus to the artist following his near fatal assassination at the hands of marginal Factory-goer Valerie Solanas on June 3, 1968. Painted eight years after this pivotal life moment, the painting achieves in a single image of a human skull, the poetic force of human impermanence.

Distinguished by a variegated palette of blue, pink, purple and ochre brushwork over the plasticity of the black silkscreened image, the present work captures Warhol’s renewed attention to painting, which began in 1972 with the Mao portraits. The gestural handling is balanced by the Warholian solitude and silence that pervades the entire composition. Warhol’s Skull is the decisive portrait of life and death, it echoes an inscription in the Capuchin Crypt of the Three Skeletons, “What you are, we once were; what we are, you someday will be.”

Previously, human identity was the focus of Warhol’s works, subjects recognizable by their gender, facial features, hairstyles or their celebrity status. The skull, devoid of all identification and the life that once was, is a counterpoint to such diversity. As Warhol’s studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone remarked of the Skull series, it would “be like doing the portrait of everybody in the world.” (Trevor Fairbrother in Exh. Cat., Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast, Andy Warhol: The Late Work, 2004, p. 70) As a universal object, the skull simultaneously allows each viewer to apply their own narrative to the object while reminding us that in the end, we are the same and death is the ultimate authority.