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Lot Essay
One of Andy Warhol’s most recognizable motifs, the artist’s Flower paintings were created in the summer of 1964 for his first show at the Castelli Gallery in New York. Ever since he had exhibited his now iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol’s reputation as the chronicler of consumerism and popular culture had been on the rise. However, in 1964 he began to paint a series of canvases featuring four brightly colored blooms rendered in vibrant colors. Although ostentatiously a series of vibrant and exuberant canvases, they possessed a deeper and characteristically darker meaning too.
This change came about in part because of a visit to Warhol’s studio by the renowned curator, Henry Geldzahler, one of the greatest champions of Pop Art. “I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death,” Geldzahler recalled. “I said, ‘Andy, maybe it’s enough death now.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, how about this? I opened a magazine to four fowers” (H. Geldzahler, quoted in T. Scherman & Dalton, Andy Warhol: His Controversial Life, Art and Colourful Times, London 2010, p. 225). The image that had caught Geldzahler eye was the now iconic photograph of a hibiscus flower taken by Patricia Caulfeld’s as an advertisement for Kodak which had appeared in Modern Photography magazine.
A classic work from the beginnings of Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s four yellow blossoms Flowers seemingly pops of the canvas, the bright blooms contrasting against the grassy black and white background. With its frontal viewpoint and cropped composition, the flowers appear to enter our space with foreground and background alternating rhythmically. The square format of the paintings particularly appealed to Warhol, because its shape permitted him to orientate the painting anyway he wished and for the first time in his career, his works abandon the conventional use of perspective to allow Yellow Flowers to be installed in a variety of ways. Another unique aspect to this series of paintings is the different techniques and media Warhol explored within them, including silkscreen, pencil, hand painted acrylics, and fluorescent Day-Glo paint.
Like much of Warhol’s oeuvre, Flowers can be read on a number of levels. Aside from their obvious beauty, the transitory nature of a flower is, particularly in Warhol’s hands, particularly poignant. And for all their seeming simplicity they also complex images to decipher aesthetically, as wrote New Yorker art critic Peter Schjedahl explained, “They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense. What killed you, killed you, was the grainy black-and-white of the stems. That grainy look...was killer, and still is. I think it still hasn’t been acknowledged that the whole critical debate should have been over at that moment. Because these Flowers paintings had all the Kantian principles that Greenberg was pushing...The Flowers resolved all [those] formal issues...but with
a realistic, not an abstract, image. And why not? Who bought it as a picture of flowers anyway? It was about the mediation...That’s
why we reach for the word ‘genius.’ Genius is what goes, ‘That’s not a problem.’ He [Warhol] sees clearly. He just does it’” (P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).
This change came about in part because of a visit to Warhol’s studio by the renowned curator, Henry Geldzahler, one of the greatest champions of Pop Art. “I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death,” Geldzahler recalled. “I said, ‘Andy, maybe it’s enough death now.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, how about this? I opened a magazine to four fowers” (H. Geldzahler, quoted in T. Scherman & Dalton, Andy Warhol: His Controversial Life, Art and Colourful Times, London 2010, p. 225). The image that had caught Geldzahler eye was the now iconic photograph of a hibiscus flower taken by Patricia Caulfeld’s as an advertisement for Kodak which had appeared in Modern Photography magazine.
A classic work from the beginnings of Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s four yellow blossoms Flowers seemingly pops of the canvas, the bright blooms contrasting against the grassy black and white background. With its frontal viewpoint and cropped composition, the flowers appear to enter our space with foreground and background alternating rhythmically. The square format of the paintings particularly appealed to Warhol, because its shape permitted him to orientate the painting anyway he wished and for the first time in his career, his works abandon the conventional use of perspective to allow Yellow Flowers to be installed in a variety of ways. Another unique aspect to this series of paintings is the different techniques and media Warhol explored within them, including silkscreen, pencil, hand painted acrylics, and fluorescent Day-Glo paint.
Like much of Warhol’s oeuvre, Flowers can be read on a number of levels. Aside from their obvious beauty, the transitory nature of a flower is, particularly in Warhol’s hands, particularly poignant. And for all their seeming simplicity they also complex images to decipher aesthetically, as wrote New Yorker art critic Peter Schjedahl explained, “They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense. What killed you, killed you, was the grainy black-and-white of the stems. That grainy look...was killer, and still is. I think it still hasn’t been acknowledged that the whole critical debate should have been over at that moment. Because these Flowers paintings had all the Kantian principles that Greenberg was pushing...The Flowers resolved all [those] formal issues...but with
a realistic, not an abstract, image. And why not? Who bought it as a picture of flowers anyway? It was about the mediation...That’s
why we reach for the word ‘genius.’ Genius is what goes, ‘That’s not a problem.’ He [Warhol] sees clearly. He just does it’” (P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).