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Lot Essay
Andy Warhol’s Flowers instantly draws viewers in with a tangy red hue set against a stern, monochromatic black and white. The flowers seem as if they are floating on the canvas, while the patterns of the grass anchor the image in flight. Distinguished by the intoxicating color combinations, Flowers was executed in 1964 at the height of his creative powers. The origin of this series blossomed from a brief exchange with the curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Henry Geldzahler. Exasperated with the artist’s dark fixation on death and disaster, and having just spent months working on his Death and Disaster series, Geldzahler suggested to Warhol that he try his hand at something different. He pointed to a photograph of flowers in Modern Photography magazine, which Warhol in his deadpan style immediately seized upon as his focus. Flowers, with its bright colors, visual vitality and celebration of the growth of the natural world, is radically different from his gruesome images of car crashes and suicides.
Warhol habitually culled the mass media for his sources, then modifying his found image, as he did in creating the screen for Flowers. The original photograph, an illustration for an article on the Kodak color processor by Patricia Caulfield, featured seven pink, red and yellow hibiscus blossoms against foliage that resembled a coniferous shrub. Warhol cropped and finally established a perfect square format in the process. Warhol enjoyed the square format because of the variable orientations it offered, stating, “I like painting on a square because you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 191).
In Flowers, Warhol adeptly marries together the old and the new; the venerable tradition of the floral still life is updated by his use of the then-revolutionary silkscreen process. “With Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my Flower period! Like Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's flowers…” (G. Malanga, quoted in D. Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, London 2003, p. 74). Warhol's interpretation of this age-old subject was entirely his own, and he rendered his flowers as mass-produced and manufactured, rousing a distinctive sort of wonder unlike the admiration for painterly hand. Flowers, with a frontal viewpoint and cropped composition, lacks a ground or horizon line and thereby dispenses with a controlled sense of space. Finally, the palette of artificial, cosmetic colors diverged from the blooms' naturalistic hues. This distinction is especially pronounced in the present works, whose effervescent red screens seem to make the medley of blooms pulsate, with figure- and ground-alternating rhythmically.
In selecting the color for his flowers, Warhol deliberately chose unnatural-looking hues of brilliant synthetic color. It was the Flowers series when color began to play an increasingly significant role in his work. The vibrant splashes of color draw the viewer in immediately. The abstract, manufactured look of these flowers highlights both their commercial application as a saleable commodity and the mass-produced process by which these natural symbols of beauty have come into being. Echoing his iconic portraits of other mass-produced beauties such as Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, the Flowers series serves as an extension of Warhol's synthetic vision of the universe into the realm of nature.
The bright colors and cheerful imagery of Flowers deny a more sinister tone that lingered from Warhol’s preceding Death and Disaster series. Colorful, vibrant and full of life, the hibiscus flowers featured traditionally denote a fleeting, transience of life. As if elaborating on his memento motifs of electric chairs, car crashes, Warhol underpins Flowers with the same melancholic tone, heralding his later skull paintings and aged self-portraits. "What is incredible about the best of the flower paintings…is that they present a distillation of much of the strength of Warhol’s art—the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer’s gaze? The vividly colored flowers always gravitate toward the surrounding blackness and finally end up in a sea of morbidity. No matter how much one wishes these flowers to remain beautiful they perish under one’s gaze, as if haunted by death” (G. Malanga, op. cit, p.74).
At the same time that Warhol engaged art history, he created a work that distilled the era’s captivating virulence as it foreshadowed the late 1960s “Flower Power” movement: “…we were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children...We were into black leather and vinyl and whips and S&M and shooting up and speed. There was nothing flower power about that. So when Warhol and that whole scene made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement... It was always that juxtaposition that appears in his art again and again that I particularly love" (R. Cutrone, quoted in J. O' Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York, 1996, p. 61). Warhol spent much of his career striving to capture on canvas the fleeting nature of both fame and life and with Flowers he found the perfect vehicle for doing so.
Warhol habitually culled the mass media for his sources, then modifying his found image, as he did in creating the screen for Flowers. The original photograph, an illustration for an article on the Kodak color processor by Patricia Caulfield, featured seven pink, red and yellow hibiscus blossoms against foliage that resembled a coniferous shrub. Warhol cropped and finally established a perfect square format in the process. Warhol enjoyed the square format because of the variable orientations it offered, stating, “I like painting on a square because you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 191).
In Flowers, Warhol adeptly marries together the old and the new; the venerable tradition of the floral still life is updated by his use of the then-revolutionary silkscreen process. “With Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my Flower period! Like Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's flowers…” (G. Malanga, quoted in D. Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, London 2003, p. 74). Warhol's interpretation of this age-old subject was entirely his own, and he rendered his flowers as mass-produced and manufactured, rousing a distinctive sort of wonder unlike the admiration for painterly hand. Flowers, with a frontal viewpoint and cropped composition, lacks a ground or horizon line and thereby dispenses with a controlled sense of space. Finally, the palette of artificial, cosmetic colors diverged from the blooms' naturalistic hues. This distinction is especially pronounced in the present works, whose effervescent red screens seem to make the medley of blooms pulsate, with figure- and ground-alternating rhythmically.
In selecting the color for his flowers, Warhol deliberately chose unnatural-looking hues of brilliant synthetic color. It was the Flowers series when color began to play an increasingly significant role in his work. The vibrant splashes of color draw the viewer in immediately. The abstract, manufactured look of these flowers highlights both their commercial application as a saleable commodity and the mass-produced process by which these natural symbols of beauty have come into being. Echoing his iconic portraits of other mass-produced beauties such as Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, the Flowers series serves as an extension of Warhol's synthetic vision of the universe into the realm of nature.
The bright colors and cheerful imagery of Flowers deny a more sinister tone that lingered from Warhol’s preceding Death and Disaster series. Colorful, vibrant and full of life, the hibiscus flowers featured traditionally denote a fleeting, transience of life. As if elaborating on his memento motifs of electric chairs, car crashes, Warhol underpins Flowers with the same melancholic tone, heralding his later skull paintings and aged self-portraits. "What is incredible about the best of the flower paintings…is that they present a distillation of much of the strength of Warhol’s art—the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer’s gaze? The vividly colored flowers always gravitate toward the surrounding blackness and finally end up in a sea of morbidity. No matter how much one wishes these flowers to remain beautiful they perish under one’s gaze, as if haunted by death” (G. Malanga, op. cit, p.74).
At the same time that Warhol engaged art history, he created a work that distilled the era’s captivating virulence as it foreshadowed the late 1960s “Flower Power” movement: “…we were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children...We were into black leather and vinyl and whips and S&M and shooting up and speed. There was nothing flower power about that. So when Warhol and that whole scene made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement... It was always that juxtaposition that appears in his art again and again that I particularly love" (R. Cutrone, quoted in J. O' Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York, 1996, p. 61). Warhol spent much of his career striving to capture on canvas the fleeting nature of both fame and life and with Flowers he found the perfect vehicle for doing so.