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Lot Essay
Executed in early 1962, Airmail Stamps is an iconic early Pop masterpiece that provides an insight into the formative moments at the dawn of that movement while also showcasing many of the conceptual issues that would provide the background for Warhol's iconic art and style. This picture shows stamps repeated and repeated and repeated, introducing the factory aesthetic that would be so vital to Warhol. And at the same time, the fact that Warhol chose stamps as a subject matter introduces an overt capitalistic element to the hallowed arena of the traditional oil-on-canvas.
At the time that Airmail Stamps was created, Warhol was still at the early pioneering stage of helming the new Pop Art. Photographs taken of his works at the time show that the Stamps were executed concurrently with some of the greatest of the Twentieth Century's artistic icons, his Campbell's Soup Cans. These Airmail Stamps therefore date from that crucial crucible moment at the very beginning of the entire Pop concept and movement as the art world was lurching into a brand new direction. This is in part demonstrated by the fact that the stamps in this work were applied by hand, by applying a hand-cut rubber stamp repeatedly to the surface in order to transfer the impression - it predates the silkscreen technique that would subsequently become his hallmark.
In a sense, the early works in this Pop vein, representing products, newspapers and currency rather than 'real' people, benefit from the strange, slightly artisanal appearance that this stamping technique created as it highlights the strange tension between factory production and artistic production, highlighting the strange crossover in which Warhol was beginning to revel. The artist-as-factory is already evident in this work in the bizarre repetition and the fact that the act of stamping the image again and again and again was deliberately mindless and time-consuming.
This was, in a sense, an emphatically modern and mock-commercial response to the gesturing and posturing of the Abstract Expressionists who still held sway over the art scene in New York in the early 1960s. The idea of representing stamps, essentially a form of currency, brings the world of finance and financial gain right under the nose of artists and viewers alike, knocking down the old artificial boundaries that had kept the world of art distant, unsullied... Even the almost playschool-like stamping technique appears to be some form of assault on the hegemony of the painters, on the importance accorded traditionally to the brush and the artist's intervention with the canvas. This is emphasised by the deliberate selection of a humdrum, understated but emphatically figurative subject, the repeated stamps. In a sense, the Airmail Stamps prefigure in two-dimensions the Brillo Box sculptures that, in two years, would mark the culminating point in the development of sculpture for critic Arthur C. Danto. For, unlike the Soup Cans, the Airmail Stamps are two-dimensional representations of an essentially two-dimensional object, albeit shown here larger than 'life'. In this, they deliberately blur the line between reality and representation. There is a question mark hovering over the entire nature of this picture.
Like Johns, Warhol has chosen a subject that is all-American. However, the stamp is a conspicuously everyday object and has no connotations of waving, fluttering Stars and Stripes, of glory and patriotism and so forth. Instead, it is a practical and utilitarian object that could be found in the homes of millions of people. In this, Warhol was showing his fascination with the stuff of the day to day life of the citizens of the capitalist U.S.A. He is celebrating the building blocks of the world in which he existed:
'I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think it's so great. It's fantastic... I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I'm not a social critic: I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best. I'm not trying to criticize the U.S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all: I'm just a pure artist, I guess' (Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, 'Andy Warhol: My True Story,' 1966, pp. 85-96, K. Goldsmith (ed.), I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962-1987, New York 2004, p. 88).
In Airmail Stamps, Warhol adds another dimension to this celebration of the very real world by mimicking stamps, basically a form of currency. This is not just the representation of an aspect of the real world, then, but is in fact closer to counterfeiting it. It has taken the objecthood of Jasper Johns' Flag to a strange new level, turning versatile Duchampian somersaults within the realms and boundaries of both traditional and avant-garde art. And of course, this financial side reflects Warhol's distinctly commercial, Pop statement that, 'Buying is much more American than thinking and I'm as American as they come' (Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1995, p. 352).
At the time that Airmail Stamps was created, Warhol was still at the early pioneering stage of helming the new Pop Art. Photographs taken of his works at the time show that the Stamps were executed concurrently with some of the greatest of the Twentieth Century's artistic icons, his Campbell's Soup Cans. These Airmail Stamps therefore date from that crucial crucible moment at the very beginning of the entire Pop concept and movement as the art world was lurching into a brand new direction. This is in part demonstrated by the fact that the stamps in this work were applied by hand, by applying a hand-cut rubber stamp repeatedly to the surface in order to transfer the impression - it predates the silkscreen technique that would subsequently become his hallmark.
In a sense, the early works in this Pop vein, representing products, newspapers and currency rather than 'real' people, benefit from the strange, slightly artisanal appearance that this stamping technique created as it highlights the strange tension between factory production and artistic production, highlighting the strange crossover in which Warhol was beginning to revel. The artist-as-factory is already evident in this work in the bizarre repetition and the fact that the act of stamping the image again and again and again was deliberately mindless and time-consuming.
This was, in a sense, an emphatically modern and mock-commercial response to the gesturing and posturing of the Abstract Expressionists who still held sway over the art scene in New York in the early 1960s. The idea of representing stamps, essentially a form of currency, brings the world of finance and financial gain right under the nose of artists and viewers alike, knocking down the old artificial boundaries that had kept the world of art distant, unsullied... Even the almost playschool-like stamping technique appears to be some form of assault on the hegemony of the painters, on the importance accorded traditionally to the brush and the artist's intervention with the canvas. This is emphasised by the deliberate selection of a humdrum, understated but emphatically figurative subject, the repeated stamps. In a sense, the Airmail Stamps prefigure in two-dimensions the Brillo Box sculptures that, in two years, would mark the culminating point in the development of sculpture for critic Arthur C. Danto. For, unlike the Soup Cans, the Airmail Stamps are two-dimensional representations of an essentially two-dimensional object, albeit shown here larger than 'life'. In this, they deliberately blur the line between reality and representation. There is a question mark hovering over the entire nature of this picture.
Like Johns, Warhol has chosen a subject that is all-American. However, the stamp is a conspicuously everyday object and has no connotations of waving, fluttering Stars and Stripes, of glory and patriotism and so forth. Instead, it is a practical and utilitarian object that could be found in the homes of millions of people. In this, Warhol was showing his fascination with the stuff of the day to day life of the citizens of the capitalist U.S.A. He is celebrating the building blocks of the world in which he existed:
'I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think it's so great. It's fantastic... I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I'm not a social critic: I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best. I'm not trying to criticize the U.S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all: I'm just a pure artist, I guess' (Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, 'Andy Warhol: My True Story,' 1966, pp. 85-96, K. Goldsmith (ed.), I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962-1987, New York 2004, p. 88).
In Airmail Stamps, Warhol adds another dimension to this celebration of the very real world by mimicking stamps, basically a form of currency. This is not just the representation of an aspect of the real world, then, but is in fact closer to counterfeiting it. It has taken the objecthood of Jasper Johns' Flag to a strange new level, turning versatile Duchampian somersaults within the realms and boundaries of both traditional and avant-garde art. And of course, this financial side reflects Warhol's distinctly commercial, Pop statement that, 'Buying is much more American than thinking and I'm as American as they come' (Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1995, p. 352).