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Lot Essay
Ablaze in glorious chromium yellow, Flowers (1964) is a vivid example of one of Andy Warhol’s most iconic and conceptually potent series. In a riposte to the romantic art-historical associations of flower painting, Warhol’s blossoms are flattened, condensed and mechanically repeated. Refined to four flat silhouettes, they glow brightly as they hover among shadowy blades of grass. The image stems from a photograph of hibiscus blooms published in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine, which was printed in four different variants to illustrate an article on a Kodak colour processor: a serial readymade which lent itself to the Warholian treatment. Creating his Flowers silkscreens on a variety of scales—all of them square, so that the canvases could be hung in grid formation on gallery walls—Warhol amplified the photograph’s implication that nature had become another packaged product in the age of consumer technology. The present Flowers, which Warhol consigned to Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in early 1965, are on an eight-by-eight-inch canvas, with the intimate presence of a devotional icon. They are artificial, luminous and beguiling.
It was the curator Henry Geldzahler who reportedly first drew Warhol’s attention to the Modern Photography image, suggesting that he shift away from his increasingly dark subject matter. ‘I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death’, he recalls. ‘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 I opened a magazine to four flowers’ (H. Geldzahler, quoted in unpublished interview with J. Stein, 1973, Geldzahler Papers, Beinecke Library). The magazine spread in fact featured seven flowers, which Warhol manipulated extensively in order to produce his trademark configuration of four. He cropped the image, shifted the placement of one of the flowers in order to fit within the square canvas, and altered their internal silhouettes. He then asked his assistant Billy Linich ‘to run the photo repeatedly through the Factory’s new photostat machine—“a dozen times, at least,” said Billy, to flatten out the blossoms, removing their definition, the shadow that lent the photo its illusion of three-dimensionality’ (T. Sherman and D. Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York 2009, p. 247).
This fierce flatness—a quality common to Warhol’s Pop aesthetic—made for a deliberate contrast with the flowers of art history, from the illusionistic allegories of the Dutch Golden Age to van Gogh’s sunflowers and the lush, plein air petals of Impressionism. But Warhol’s flowers took on their own stark beauty. David Bourdon likened them to ‘cut out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet’s lily pond’ (D. Bourdon, ‘Andy Warhol’ The Village Voice, 3 December 1964, p. 11). Splendid and impermanent, flowers—particularly in Old Masterly still lifes—had long been a symbol for transience and the vanishing glory of all worldly things. Warhol’s flowers can be understood as modern vanitas motifs in this sense. They were not only an anti-painterly gesture, but also a product of a wider cultural moment in which the idealism of the early-sixties ‘flower power’ era was wilting. At the same time, however, Warhol’s blooms have a newfound sense of permanence. In their indelible, Day-Glo colours and relentless repetition, these flowers never fade.
It was the curator Henry Geldzahler who reportedly first drew Warhol’s attention to the Modern Photography image, suggesting that he shift away from his increasingly dark subject matter. ‘I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death’, he recalls. ‘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 unpublished interview with J. Stein, 1973, Geldzahler Papers, Beinecke Library). The magazine spread in fact featured seven flowers, which Warhol manipulated extensively in order to produce his trademark configuration of four. He cropped the image, shifted the placement of one of the flowers in order to fit within the square canvas, and altered their internal silhouettes. He then asked his assistant Billy Linich ‘to run the photo repeatedly through the Factory’s new photostat machine—“a dozen times, at least,” said Billy, to flatten out the blossoms, removing their definition, the shadow that lent the photo its illusion of three-dimensionality’ (T. Sherman and D. Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York 2009, p. 247).
This fierce flatness—a quality common to Warhol’s Pop aesthetic—made for a deliberate contrast with the flowers of art history, from the illusionistic allegories of the Dutch Golden Age to van Gogh’s sunflowers and the lush, plein air petals of Impressionism. But Warhol’s flowers took on their own stark beauty. David Bourdon likened them to ‘cut out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet’s lily pond’ (D. Bourdon, ‘Andy Warhol’ The Village Voice, 3 December 1964, p. 11). Splendid and impermanent, flowers—particularly in Old Masterly still lifes—had long been a symbol for transience and the vanishing glory of all worldly things. Warhol’s flowers can be understood as modern vanitas motifs in this sense. They were not only an anti-painterly gesture, but also a product of a wider cultural moment in which the idealism of the early-sixties ‘flower power’ era was wilting. At the same time, however, Warhol’s blooms have a newfound sense of permanence. In their indelible, Day-Glo colours and relentless repetition, these flowers never fade.