Andy Warhol

Galerie 1900-2000, Paris

Private Collection, Buenos Aires

CGR Gallery, New York 

Armand Ornstein, Paris

Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner

George Frei and  Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Volume 2B, 1964-1969, New York 2004, p. 42, no. 1481, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant. Condition: This work is in good condition. The work has been re-stretched and there are associated specks of paint loss along the top left edge, which fluoresce darker under ultra violet light. There are faint stretcher bar marks from the old stretcher running intermittently along all four edges. Close inspection reveals some unobtrusive hairline cracks in places throughout most notably to the top of the top left flower, the right of the bottom left flower, and the top left of the top right flower. Examination under ultra violet light reveals retouchings in isolated places along the extreme edges, to the right of the top left flower and to the bottom of the lower right flower.
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Andy Warhol’s Flowers are some of the most enduring icons of the Pop era and marked a significant turning point in the artist's practice. They were a shift away from brand names, away from the chilling narrative fact of the Death and Disaster series, and towards something wholly more abstract. They also constituted Warhol’s first show with the Leo Castelli Gallery and his resulting accession to the “cream of the crop of American vanguard art” (Michael Lobel quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Eykyn Maclean, Andy Warhol: Flowers, 2012, n.p.). This work is typical of the celebrated series in its planar unmodulated silkscreened appearance, its deft exploration of morbidity, and its implicit assertion of Warhol’s role within a wider art-historical discourse.

The Flowers are cropped, rotated, and printed versions of an extract from Modern Photography magazine. Warhol articulated the images in various colours and orientations and reproduced them in 82, 48, and 24 inch canvases for the aforementioned Castelli show, as well as for an exhibition at Ileana Sonnabend Galerie in Paris. Flowers on white backgrounds are rare: only six were made in this 24 inch format, along with seven 48 inch examples, and two sized at 82 inches.

Compared to the abject horror in such preceding works as the Electric Chairs, these hibiscus flowers seem conspicuously banal. Viewed on patently printed square grounds, some have suggested that they recall Warhol’s work as a commercial artist in the 1950s – appearing as a “gaudy shower curtain or the fabric for ladies’ cheap raincoats” (Lucy Lippard quoted in: ibid.). However, in rejecting the literal, almost didactic, content of his earlier works in favour of something more domestic and familiar in tone, Warhol invites a broader analysis of his work, invests greater philosophical import, and allows his viewers to ascribe their own meaning.

In selecting the seemingly innocuous motif of delicate hibiscus blossoms, Warhol implicitly confronted the centuries old art historical tradition of still-life painting. He asserted himself as part of the same discourse as the great French Impressionists, even the seventeenth-century Dutch painters of the vanitas: “In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like now we’re doing my Flower period! Like Monet’s water lillies, Van Gogh’s flowers” (Gerard Malanga in: David Dalton and David McCabe, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York 2003, p. 74). However, in the present work, the complex modelling and perspective tricks of Dutch seventeenth-century still life works are abandoned in favour of the flat planar screenprint. Meanwhile, the sublime colouration and Impressionistic force of Monet and Van Gogh is replaced by synthetic fluorescent pink, burning against a monochromatic background.

In this context, the flowers are laced with a morbid tone. Their fragile forms are suffused with mortality and, as with so much of Warhol’s oeuvre, a comment on the brevity of life lingers beneath the acrylic silkscreened surface of this delicate work. Flowers die; they are fleeting moments of beauty that perish under our gaze. To this end, their inclusion as content makes a pertinent comparison with the Jackie and Marilyn series. All of these works are dominated by societally accepted paradigms of beauty. However, in each series, death is just around the corner, and the viewer is never allowed to forget the pathetic fragility of life.