Andy Warhol

Acquired directly from the artist 

George Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Volume 3, 1970-1974, New York 2010, p. 123, no. 2213, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly darker in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a few minute specks of media accretion scattered throughout. Further inspection reveals two tiny networks of extremely faint cracks: one towards the upper centre of the right hand edge and one towards the lower centre of the right hand edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Buxy Gancia is a ravishing early example of Andy Warhol’s society portraits. Gracing the front of some of the most iconic magazine covers of the 1960s and 70s such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Elle, Buxy Gancia was a defining face of her generation; a socialite who was ubiquitous to glamorous New York in her day and friends with icons such as Gunther Sachs, Brigitte Bardot and Grace Kelly. Buxy Gancia was a model for, and friend of Coco Chanel, who then became an early Pop collector and thus a member of Warhol’s ever glamorous clique. Indeed, it was through this relationship that Buxy Gancia herself became a friend of Warhol and as such hers was one of the earliest portraits to be completed in 1972. The present work is set apart from later portraits not only in its rare larger canvas size (130cm square versus the later standard 100cm format), but also through the sensuous mysteriousness of the abstract, veil-like background. The over-exposed purple ground precludes a comprehensive reading of the sitter, yet the fresh beauty of the former model’s face cuts through with extreme clarity and force. Warhol’s idiosyncratic flatness lends an impactful graphic touch to her doe-like eyes and silhouetted cheekbones.

Warhol’s portrait commissions of the 1970s, the largest and longest series of his entire career, presented a paradigm shift; a complete reinvigoration of the society. Using his still revolutionary screen-printing technique, Warhol documented the characters of the international beau monde and single-handedly “revived the crackle, glitter, and chic of older traditions of society portraiture” (Carter Ratcliff quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andy Warhol: Portraits of the ‘70s, 1980, p. 18). Some have compared these works to the grand tradition of Greco-Roman statuary in their comprehensive record of the great and good of contemporaneous culture, and persistent use of the bust format. Others have pointed to the influence of police mug shots; Warhol was fascinated by these images and had directly relied on them in his celebrated early work Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964). Warhol recognised the immutable power of the celebrity photographs in gossip pages and fashion magazines; he identified the influence they had over their viewers and exploited it, on an industrial level, for his own artistic ends.

To create his portraits, Warhol took polaroid photographs of his sitters before screenprinting them on a grand scale. Not only did he take hundreds of photos of each subject, he also encouraged them to take an active role in selecting the right one; he was not so much focussed on producing an accurate likeness but more so on creating a powerful image where the subject looked as beautiful as possible.  In this way, and in a manner entirely befitting of his ‘Factory’ studio, he mechanised the process of turning his sitters into celebrities, and his images into icons. As the 1970s progressed, Warhol overtook the paparazzi and the high-fashion photographers; his portraits became the undisputed arbiters of fame, and he became the leading interpreter of the zeitgeist; “Warhol’s portraits deflect the documentary force of photography, glamourizing the evidence delivered by the lens, reimagining it in ways that can endow a simple headshot with the aura of an impossibly intense individuality” (Carter Ratcliff quoted in: Tony Shafrazi, Ed., Andy Warhol Portraits, New York 2007, p. 21).

In its deep saturated colour scheme, in its blank unmodulated background, and in its stylised studied gaze and pose, Portrait of Buxy Gancia seems to adumbrate the ‘Photoshop’ era of glamour. This is a trait central to the celebrated portrait series, and one that adds to the pseudo-utopian mood: everyone is beautiful, everyone is famous, and everyone is portrayed exactly as perfectly as is possible. In his use of the polaroid camera and the screen-printing press, Andy Warhol created a celebrity machine, and through his cunning and contemporaneously fitting choice of sitters, not least Buxy Gancia, he installed himself at the controls.