ANDY WARHOL | Vesuvius

Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1985

Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, Vesuvius by Warhol, July - October 1985, p. 59, illustrated in colour
Milan, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Warhol Beuys. Omaggio a Lucio Amelio, October 2007 - March 2008, p. 166, illustrated in colour
Naples, PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Andy Warhol: Vetrine, April - July 2014, p. 27, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the turquoise is less green and the colours are more vibrant overall in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals minor spots of burnishing and faint evidence of handling in a few places to the extreme outer edges. Further close inspection reveals a pinhead-sized dent to the top right corner and two rub marks along the bottom edge. Extremely close inspection reveals a faint stretcher bar mark to the top edge and upper left edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
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“An eruption is an overwhelming image, an extraordinary happening and even a great piece of sculpture.”
Andy Warhol in conversation with Michele Bonuomo in: Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, Vesuvius by Warhol, 1985, p. 35. In 1985, Andy Warhol embarked on a vibrant series of acrylic on canvas paintings depicting Vesuvius at its sublime moment of eruption. Of the sixteen works in the series, just eight examples were made in the scale of the present painting. Composed for Warhol’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, which took place in the year of their creation, each work is uniquely rendered in a kaleidoscopic array of popping, fizzing hues. Rare and distinguished, the series is entirely hand-painted within an oeuvre dominated by silkscreen printing. As the artist proclaimed: “I painted each Vesuvius by hand always using different colors so that they can give the impression of having been painted just one minute after the eruption” (Andy Warhol in conversation with Michele Bonuomo in: Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, Vesuvius by Warhol, 1985, p. 36). Spectacularly rendered in a vivid palette of molten red, peach-orange, lilac, burgundy and two shades of aquamarine, the saturated base colours of the present example project a mood of sprightly ebullience that seems disquietingly at odds with the force and horror of a volcanic eruption. Encapsulating Warhol’s renowned and celebrated Pop vernacular, Vesuvius contends with some of the most pressing themes explored within the artist’s illustrious and wildly influential career: most notably, the legacy of art history and the omnipotence of death.  

For Warhol to take as his subject the world’s most infamous volcano was to position his series within a rich and venerable tradition of history painting. During the Neoclassical era of the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius had become a key trope to convey the awesome and sublime power of nature, and was captured in paint by artists including JMW Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby. Moreover, that the series was conceived for the prestigious Museo di Capodimonte, a revered space usually reserved for the exhibition of Old Masters such as Titian and Caravaggio, further steeps the series in art historical import. Vibrant and explosive in palette and composition, the present Vesuvius can be interpreted as an idiosyncratic and subversive reinterpretation of this art historical legacy.

Imbued with the threat of impending catastrophe, Vesuvius is redolent of the morbid contemplation that Warhol poignantly explored in his Death and Disaster series of the 1960s. Revisiting this theme, Warhol’s work of the 1980s offers a more nuanced and profound reflection on mortality by presenting not death itself, but rather its looming imminence: a spectre that always weighed heavily on the artist. As he noted early in his career, "I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death" (Andy Warhol cited in: Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988-89, p. 19). Through a typically Warholian confluence of death and art history, the present painting beautifully encapsulates the raw conceptual impetus of the artist’s revolutionary practice.