Lot Essay
Uniquely American, the electric chair was invented in 1889 and first used in 1890 to execute William Kemmler, a man convicted of slaying his wife with an axe. The use of electricity as a means of execution was first contemplated in America in the early 1880s. Electricity by contrast was a new and invisible technology, that, alongside the invention of the light bulb and the recent wiring-up of the country's towns and cities was, quite literally, an icon of America's bright future.
The electric chair that appears in Andy Warhol's haunting images of a lone apparatus standing in an alienating empty concrete space surmounted with a one-word sign commanding 'Silence', is thought to be the chair at Sing Sing State Penitentiary in New York. It was used for the last two times in March and August of 1963 for the executions of Frederick Charles Wood and Eddie Lee Mays. These executions were a topical subject in New York at this time and public debate around them may well have played a part in prompting Warhol's choice of this sinister American icon as topical and tendentious subject-matter.
What particularly impressed Warhol about the electric chair was its Americanness. The 'Chair', by then almost a 'star' itself of the film noir atmosphere that permeated so much of Warhol's art of this period, was a uniquely American 'way to go'. In this respect, it offered itself as the perfect subject for inclusion in the series of (Death and Disaster) paintings that, in 1963, Warhol was preparing for his first exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris which he wanted to call, "Death in America". Essentially, a killing-machine manufactured by the same industrial system of mass production that produces Campbell soup cans and Coke bottles, the electric chair, like Warhol's cans of poisoned tuna fish, presents the dark side of American consumer capitalist culture. Without comment Warhol presents the simple pictorial facts of the American death industry within one haunting iconic portrait. And, as if to emphasize this somber film noir aspect of these works, each work is executed in a particularly dark and grainy black silkscreen print laid over a radiating undertone of garish electric color.
This simple painterly technique, which runs from Warhol's scenes of Car Crashes and Suicides to those of the Race Riots and the Atomic Bomb, is particularly effective with the lonely, solitary and iconic image of the electric chair, especially in the single-portrait paintings of the 'Chair' that Warhol made in the winter of 1964-5 to which the present work belongs. On purely a pictorial level, the solitary emptiness and minimal vacancy of the image is profoundly disturbing. But this is also augmented by the somber tones of Warhol's grainy print and seemingly reinforced by the ominous single-word sign ordering 'silence'. A sobering mechanized counterpart to his infamous portraits of New York's 'Most Wanted Men', the electric chair is all the more terrifying because the violence of the image is wholly absent, only implied. This violence exists only in the mind of the viewer. It is a nightmare that that taps into our innate collective dread of cold technology and is projected onto the inanimate image of the death-chair and the empty room around it filling these pictures' disquieting blanks and shadows with an implicit and ominous sense of dread.
Warhol was acutely conscious of this act of pictorial coercion and eager to create works that though seemingly objective, actively encouraged the viewer's complicity as well as questioning it. The empty chair has been a motif often used in art history, most famously in Samuel Filde's portrait of Dickens' vacant seat at Gad's Hill and Vincent Van Gogh's empty chairs painted for his father and for Paul Gauguin. Manipulating this art historical convention and turning on its head the way these images suggest the melancholy absence of a person, Warhol, in this 'empty chair' painting creates a work that throws this mental projection of the viewer back at them. A sinister icon of vacancy, Warhol's empty electric chair, here made all the more cold and impersonal by being rendered in an electric phthalo blue, seems to demand and await an occupant, one that only the viewer can envisage and provide. In doing this, this vacant and 'empty' silkscreen painting asks a series of difficult and probing existential questions about crime and punishment and the nature and humanity of violence, mortality and death.
The electric chair that appears in Andy Warhol's haunting images of a lone apparatus standing in an alienating empty concrete space surmounted with a one-word sign commanding 'Silence', is thought to be the chair at Sing Sing State Penitentiary in New York. It was used for the last two times in March and August of 1963 for the executions of Frederick Charles Wood and Eddie Lee Mays. These executions were a topical subject in New York at this time and public debate around them may well have played a part in prompting Warhol's choice of this sinister American icon as topical and tendentious subject-matter.
What particularly impressed Warhol about the electric chair was its Americanness. The 'Chair', by then almost a 'star' itself of the film noir atmosphere that permeated so much of Warhol's art of this period, was a uniquely American 'way to go'. In this respect, it offered itself as the perfect subject for inclusion in the series of (Death and Disaster) paintings that, in 1963, Warhol was preparing for his first exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris which he wanted to call, "Death in America". Essentially, a killing-machine manufactured by the same industrial system of mass production that produces Campbell soup cans and Coke bottles, the electric chair, like Warhol's cans of poisoned tuna fish, presents the dark side of American consumer capitalist culture. Without comment Warhol presents the simple pictorial facts of the American death industry within one haunting iconic portrait. And, as if to emphasize this somber film noir aspect of these works, each work is executed in a particularly dark and grainy black silkscreen print laid over a radiating undertone of garish electric color.
This simple painterly technique, which runs from Warhol's scenes of Car Crashes and Suicides to those of the Race Riots and the Atomic Bomb, is particularly effective with the lonely, solitary and iconic image of the electric chair, especially in the single-portrait paintings of the 'Chair' that Warhol made in the winter of 1964-5 to which the present work belongs. On purely a pictorial level, the solitary emptiness and minimal vacancy of the image is profoundly disturbing. But this is also augmented by the somber tones of Warhol's grainy print and seemingly reinforced by the ominous single-word sign ordering 'silence'. A sobering mechanized counterpart to his infamous portraits of New York's 'Most Wanted Men', the electric chair is all the more terrifying because the violence of the image is wholly absent, only implied. This violence exists only in the mind of the viewer. It is a nightmare that that taps into our innate collective dread of cold technology and is projected onto the inanimate image of the death-chair and the empty room around it filling these pictures' disquieting blanks and shadows with an implicit and ominous sense of dread.
Warhol was acutely conscious of this act of pictorial coercion and eager to create works that though seemingly objective, actively encouraged the viewer's complicity as well as questioning it. The empty chair has been a motif often used in art history, most famously in Samuel Filde's portrait of Dickens' vacant seat at Gad's Hill and Vincent Van Gogh's empty chairs painted for his father and for Paul Gauguin. Manipulating this art historical convention and turning on its head the way these images suggest the melancholy absence of a person, Warhol, in this 'empty chair' painting creates a work that throws this mental projection of the viewer back at them. A sinister icon of vacancy, Warhol's empty electric chair, here made all the more cold and impersonal by being rendered in an electric phthalo blue, seems to demand and await an occupant, one that only the viewer can envisage and provide. In doing this, this vacant and 'empty' silkscreen painting asks a series of difficult and probing existential questions about crime and punishment and the nature and humanity of violence, mortality and death.