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Lot Essay
Completed just months before his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s Lenin is a striking, bold portrait of the political revolutionary. His holographic form, glowing in yellow, emerges from a saturated red backdrop. Atop the searing ground, Warhol has traced Lenin’s face in a vivid, brilliant blue. Scant geometric forms hint at his body: two triangles make a collar while a single horizontal band forms the book upon which Lenin rests his arm. As with his images of other public figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth, in Lenin, Warhol emphasises only the most striking features of his subject’s face: the pointed beard and piercing stare. The image forms a compelling portrait and an arresting depiction of one of the most influential and notorious figures of the 20th century.
To create his silkscreened painting, Warhol used an image of a youthful Lenin taken at the close of the 19th century, which portrays the young revolutionary as a confident intellectual. The photograph was first shown to Warhol by the gallerist Bernd Klüser. In the early 1980s, Klüser and Warhol were working to develop a new collaborative project for which Warhol would move away from icons of Americana. The gallerist realised the possibilities opened up by the portrait of Lenin. Warhol, he recalled, wanted to be ‘confronted with an image which went against the grain of his usual preoccupations. By virtue of both its content and formal quality, the photograph of Lenin seemed ideal for the purpose’ (B. Klüser, quoted in Lenin by Andy Warhol, Munich 1987, p. 68). Interestingly, this source image had in fact already been doctored long before it was brought to Warhol’s attention. Lenin was initially photographed amongst a larger group of his peers in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; after they turned against him, Lenin had them scrubbed from the picture, leaving his own image alone.
Committed to mining popular culture for his iconography, Warhol moved seamlessly from his earlier portraits of celebrities to that of the political figure and authoritarian ruler. In doing so, he shrewdly exposed the power of mass media to create, canonise, and commodify personas for the purpose of collective absorption. Where his simplified representations of glamorous stars reflected the consumerist ethos of American capitalism and the advertising and publicity machinations that underpin it, Lenin draws from the centrally controlled propaganda apparatus in Soviet Russia—and highlights the ways in which the West has also received and relied upon these same symbols. By operating as a quasi-spin doctor, Warhol lays bare the ways in which meaning is constructed and manipulated.
To create his silkscreened painting, Warhol used an image of a youthful Lenin taken at the close of the 19th century, which portrays the young revolutionary as a confident intellectual. The photograph was first shown to Warhol by the gallerist Bernd Klüser. In the early 1980s, Klüser and Warhol were working to develop a new collaborative project for which Warhol would move away from icons of Americana. The gallerist realised the possibilities opened up by the portrait of Lenin. Warhol, he recalled, wanted to be ‘confronted with an image which went against the grain of his usual preoccupations. By virtue of both its content and formal quality, the photograph of Lenin seemed ideal for the purpose’ (B. Klüser, quoted in Lenin by Andy Warhol, Munich 1987, p. 68). Interestingly, this source image had in fact already been doctored long before it was brought to Warhol’s attention. Lenin was initially photographed amongst a larger group of his peers in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; after they turned against him, Lenin had them scrubbed from the picture, leaving his own image alone.
Committed to mining popular culture for his iconography, Warhol moved seamlessly from his earlier portraits of celebrities to that of the political figure and authoritarian ruler. In doing so, he shrewdly exposed the power of mass media to create, canonise, and commodify personas for the purpose of collective absorption. Where his simplified representations of glamorous stars reflected the consumerist ethos of American capitalism and the advertising and publicity machinations that underpin it, Lenin draws from the centrally controlled propaganda apparatus in Soviet Russia—and highlights the ways in which the West has also received and relied upon these same symbols. By operating as a quasi-spin doctor, Warhol lays bare the ways in which meaning is constructed and manipulated.