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Lot Essay
Andy Warhol's portrait of Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, is both the result of a meeting of two of the great cultural icons of the Twentieth Century and also an insight into the friendship between the artist and the rock star. In Mick Jagger, created circa 1975, Jagger is shown with his famous pouting lips highlighted in pink with flecks of turquoise. Warhol has added a painterly zest to the surface of this picture, allowing the inks to amass in a way that appears more gestural, and has heightened this effect with the flickering drawn marks. This pictorial energy reflects the charisma of its subject Jagger is shown with his shoulders bare, his hair flowing. This is the face of a true celebrity. Yet it is a tribute to the friendship between Jagger and Warhol that the singer had posed for several Polaroid shots which the artist then used as the basis for his portraits.
By the time he created Mick Jagger, Warhol had known the singer for over a decade, having been introduced to the Rolling Stones by Baby Jane Holzer back in 1964. They had become friends, and Warhol even produced several album covers for the Stones; this included the celebrated cover for Sticky Fingers, the 1971 album. This featured an image of a man wearing jeans, shown from waist down to mid-thigh; a real zipper in the centre meant that the listener could peek through and see the man's underwear. This legendary artwork was nominated for a Grammy; its bold design was deemed scandalous enough that it was banned in Spain and Singapore.
The media side of the relationship between Jagger and Warhol was also demonstrated in the artist's magazine, Interview: Jagger was on the cover of the second edition, in 1969, and held a record, appearing five times in all, gracing it once more in 1985. On a more personal level, Mick Jagger dates from around the period when the Rolling Stones rented Warhol's estate in Montauk in order to gain some peace and distance for their recordings. Warhol was a frequent visitor both there and backstage when the Stones toured, and became a close friend of Jagger's then wife, Bianca; he also later became a friend of Jerry Hall.
In Mick Jagger, Warhol has taken the original image and has added drawn and painterly elements of his own, a technique that he had first used in his Mao pictures and which he has here developed to a new extreme, using the sometimes deliberately off-set details to add an electric emphasis to the image while also lending it more substance. Interestingly, the portraits of Jagger are often linked to Warhol's Ladies and Gentlemen series from the same period. In that group of works, whose title was itself a reference to the Stones' earlier tour movie of the same name, transvestites vamped it up before the camera in a playful manner echoed here by Jagger.
By the time he created Mick Jagger, Warhol had known the singer for over a decade, having been introduced to the Rolling Stones by Baby Jane Holzer back in 1964. They had become friends, and Warhol even produced several album covers for the Stones; this included the celebrated cover for Sticky Fingers, the 1971 album. This featured an image of a man wearing jeans, shown from waist down to mid-thigh; a real zipper in the centre meant that the listener could peek through and see the man's underwear. This legendary artwork was nominated for a Grammy; its bold design was deemed scandalous enough that it was banned in Spain and Singapore.
The media side of the relationship between Jagger and Warhol was also demonstrated in the artist's magazine, Interview: Jagger was on the cover of the second edition, in 1969, and held a record, appearing five times in all, gracing it once more in 1985. On a more personal level, Mick Jagger dates from around the period when the Rolling Stones rented Warhol's estate in Montauk in order to gain some peace and distance for their recordings. Warhol was a frequent visitor both there and backstage when the Stones toured, and became a close friend of Jagger's then wife, Bianca; he also later became a friend of Jerry Hall.
In Mick Jagger, Warhol has taken the original image and has added drawn and painterly elements of his own, a technique that he had first used in his Mao pictures and which he has here developed to a new extreme, using the sometimes deliberately off-set details to add an electric emphasis to the image while also lending it more substance. Interestingly, the portraits of Jagger are often linked to Warhol's Ladies and Gentlemen series from the same period. In that group of works, whose title was itself a reference to the Stones' earlier tour movie of the same name, transvestites vamped it up before the camera in a playful manner echoed here by Jagger.