安迪·沃荷

Galerie Bischofsberger, Zurich
Private Collection (acquired from the above)
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York

Hamburg, Diechtorhallen, Andy Warhol-Retrospektiv, 1993, p. 99, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is wear to all four corner tips. Close inspection reveals light handling marks in places along all four edges, and intermittent stretching cracks to the right edge. There is a feather crack and further hairline cracking to the bottom left corner and the centre of the left edge. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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 1978 Andy Warhol began a series known as the Reversals, which featured negative-image prints of his most famous motifs from the early ‘sixties. Multicolored Retrospective, executed in 1979, hails from the Retrospectives series - a subset of the Reversals - whose compositions were drawn from Warhol’s most iconic images to date spanning 1961 to 1972. Each was already considered a classic of Western art: the Campbell’s Soup Can, the Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Box, a Car Crash, the Electric Chair, the Flowers, his Cow Wallpaper, a Photo-Booth Self-Portrait, and Chairman Mao. Of the ten ‘greatest hits’ assembled, only nine or fewer were ever featured on a single canvas. The present work displays five that brilliantly chart Warhol’s diverse thematic endeavours: his three most famous celebrity, art historical, and political portraits, respectively; his earliest and most enduring advertising appropriation, the Campbell’s soup cans from 1961; and his first foray into installation art, the Flowers from 1964. Continuing Warhol’s uncanny prescience for cultural currents, and offering an astounding pictorial summation of his oeuvre, the Retrospectives contemplate earlier achievements with a newfound distance, recapitulating their motifs to meditate upon the death of modernism and the advent of a postmodern sensibility. The images in Multicolored Retrospectivepossess an appropriately spectal quality: positive outlines emerge from - or perhaps dissolve into - the now-dominant negative areas and Warhol’s jubilant ‘sixties palette.

Warhol once said: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (the artist quoted in: Annette Michelson, Ed., Andy Warhol (October Files), Cambridge 2001, p. 71). Multicolored Retrospective therefore functions as a form self-portrait, offering a collated composite of the very surfaces which most defined Warhol. “These were the images that had made him famous - the icons, symbols and brands through which he had made his own name and which had therefore to some extent become associated with his own life, history, career and myth” (Roberto Marrone, ‘Retrospectives and Reversals’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Zurich, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Andy Warhol: Big Retrospective Painting, pp. 23-4). In 1979 Warhol also published Popism: The Warhol Sixties, and exhibited many of his ‘seventies celebrity commission portraits at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; his mood was decidedly reflective. The overlapping, free-floating images of the present work suggest a postmodern tone: divorced from a fixed locus on the canvas, they migrate uninhibited and uprooted like empty signifiers defined entirely by their surface appearances. The abstract nature of their imbricated and colourful forms situates the Retrospectives within a larger group of semi-abstract series inspired by the acknowledgement of modernism’s failed grand narratives, including the Oxidation and Shadow paintings  from 1978 (the latter of which Warhol famously referred to as “disco decoration”), and the Rorschachs from 1984. Reinventing and reappropriating his own already appropriated imagery, in the present work Warhol cannily draws attention to early Pop’s marked precociousness in utilising such postmodern techniques as critique of originality, irony, collage, pluralism and parody.

Considering the affinities between Warholian and Duchampian techniques of appropriation, it is unsurprising that Warhol owned works by Duchamp, among them two editions of his famed Boîte-en-valise, one first edition from 1941 and another from the 1950s. This project undoubtedly influenced Warhol’s Retrospectives: the Boîte-en-valises were leather suitcases containing compartments and display panels designed to house miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s best works. Yet while Warhol redacted his selection to the ten which made him most famous - fame ever the guiding light of his interest - Duchamp undertook to meticulously catalogue his entire oeuvre, visiting disparate collections worldwide to develop an encyclopaedic awareness of his own output before selecting sixty-nine works for reproduction in the project. Whereas both thus constitute a miniature exhibition or pictorial manifesto cohesively expressing the artist’s most important achievements, Warhol’s version maintains its allegiance to popular opinion as the prime curator. A powerful coalescence of the most emblematic images not only of Pop, but also of Twentieth Century art, Multicolored Retrospective testifies to Warhol’s mastery over contemporary visual culture.