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Lot Essay
Flowers (1978) is a stunning depiction of one of Andy Warhol’s most iconic subjects, taken from the seminal series of the same name. Sprouting from a sizeable, square canvas, four blooms are rendered in an alluring, Day-Glo yellow, accentuated against a monochrome background of spiky grass. The vivid, fluorescent appearance of the quartet recalls Warhol’s signature immortalisations of contemporary film stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, the silkscreen process lending the flowers a sparkling and luscious luminosity. Warhol’s thick application of the polymer paint, which is brightly oversaturated, manifests his subject as brashly, unashamedly artificial. With this gestural sense of painterly application, combined with an aerial viewpoint and a two-dimensional flatness, Flowers advances towards a quasi-abstract nature, the appropriated source material refashioned beyond almost all recognition.
Warhol premiered his flower paintings at a sold-out exhibition for Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1964. Henry Geldzahler, then the curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum, planted the seeds for his new subject, later reminiscing that ‘I looked around [Warhol’s] studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death. 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 I opened a magazine to four flowers’ (H. Geldzahler, quoted in an unpublished interview with J. Stein, 1973, Geldzahler Papers, Beinecke Library). That magazine was the June edition of Modern Photography, which featured photographs of hibiscus blossoms, taken by Patricia Caulfield for an instructive article on Kodak colour processing. Warhol, possibly inspired by Caulfield’s four variant images with slight differentiations in colouring, produced a series of paintings with a spectrum of chromatic modulations. One of Warhol’s assistants, George Malanga, later commented that ‘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 , the genre’ (G. Malanga, quoted in D. Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol , London, 2003, p. 74).
However, in opposition to this apparent celebration of a well established, revered art-historical genre, a subversive melancholy underlies the foundation of the series, with Warhol both critiquing the fluidity with which modern culture can be appropriated and reproduced, and simultaneously destabilising the hippie movement of the decade’s later years. ‘We all knew the dark side of those Flowers ’, explained Ronnie Cutrone, another of Warhol’s assistants and a fellow pop artist, ‘don’t forget, at that time, there was flower power and flower children. We were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children. Instead, we used to goof on it. 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’ (R. Cutrone, quoted in J. O'Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol , New York, 1996, p. 61). There is a tantalising tension in Flowers , a pull between the immediacy of the seductive style that spawned it and the deadpan subversiveness of Warhol’s creative voice. By commodifying the blossoms with garish glitz and stripping them of their bucolic romanticism, Warhol perpetuates the dark undercurrent that floods through the contemporaneous Death and Destruction series. A playful cynicism is at work here, the lifelessly flat petals modelled as ravishing, irresistible signifiers of transience and mortality; a vanitas symbol for the pop generation.
Warhol premiered his flower paintings at a sold-out exhibition for Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1964. Henry Geldzahler, then the curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum, planted the seeds for his new subject, later reminiscing that ‘I looked around [Warhol’s] studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death. 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 flowers’ (H. Geldzahler, quoted in an unpublished interview with J. Stein, 1973, Geldzahler Papers, Beinecke Library). That magazine was the June edition of Modern Photography, which featured photographs of hibiscus blossoms, taken by Patricia Caulfield for an instructive article on Kodak colour processing. Warhol, possibly inspired by Caulfield’s four variant images with slight differentiations in colouring, produced a series of paintings with a spectrum of chromatic modulations. One of Warhol’s assistants, George Malanga, later commented that ‘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 , the genre’ (G. Malanga, quoted in D. Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol , London, 2003, p. 74).
However, in opposition to this apparent celebration of a well established, revered art-historical genre, a subversive melancholy underlies the foundation of the series, with Warhol both critiquing the fluidity with which modern culture can be appropriated and reproduced, and simultaneously destabilising the hippie movement of the decade’s later years. ‘We all knew the dark side of those Flowers ’, explained Ronnie Cutrone, another of Warhol’s assistants and a fellow pop artist, ‘don’t forget, at that time, there was flower power and flower children. We were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children. Instead, we used to goof on it. 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’ (R. Cutrone, quoted in J. O'Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol , New York, 1996, p. 61). There is a tantalising tension in Flowers , a pull between the immediacy of the seductive style that spawned it and the deadpan subversiveness of Warhol’s creative voice. By commodifying the blossoms with garish glitz and stripping them of their bucolic romanticism, Warhol perpetuates the dark undercurrent that floods through the contemporaneous Death and Destruction series. A playful cynicism is at work here, the lifelessly flat petals modelled as ravishing, irresistible signifiers of transience and mortality; a vanitas symbol for the pop generation.