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Lot Essay
Crisply inked in black and white monochrome, Flowers is a bold rendition of an iconic image from the pantheon of Andy Warhol's oeuvre, executed at a time when the artist was casting a retrospective eye over his own art. Flowers revisits the artist's celebrated series of the same name, undertaken in 1964 for his inaugural show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. One of a small group of Flowers from 1978, the present work was created using the same 22-inch size acetate as from his important European exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1965. Warhol's interplay of monochromatic silvery primer and large expanses of brilliant white blossoms with a pitch black patterned overlay echoes the silkscreening practice of removing all colour from the template before undertaking the printing process. Warhol sourced the image from Modern Photography magazine and inversed the colours in order to heighten the contrast - a process which essentially foreshadowed his Reversals series by over a decade. This deliberately heightened contrast obliterates the blossom's texture, making the outline of the flowers the most dominant pictorial element. By taking his celebrated image from 1964 of a stripped and flattened hibiscus flower, Warhol not only bestowed his iconic image with a new mood and context but also undoubtedly proved his uncanny ability to take familiar imagery anchored to a specific time and place and make it revelatory of its time. Made during a transitional period in art history and in Warhol's career, Flowers (1978) is indicative of the increasingly contemplative and reflective awareness taking hold in the artist's career in the late 1970s.
Warhol's first conceived silkscreen Flowers series of 1964 was the culmination of a long progression of great series by the artist from his Campbell Soup Cans and Coca-Cola Bottles, his celebrity portraits of stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, to his Death & Disaster images. The pervasive qualities of seriality, banality and emptiness in these works, in conjunction with Warhol's own admission that 'everything I was doing must have been Death', led to the sentiment that there was an overriding morbidity running through his work (A. Warhol, quoted in G.R. Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?', Art News, 62, November 1963, pp. 60-63). Following in the immediate aftermath of these seminal works and in response to Warhol finally securing a show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, his silkscreen Flowers paintings, with their day-glo colours, were widely perceived as a happier turn in the artist's oeuvre. Yet as the classic image of ephemerality, the flower belongs to a long art historical tradition of still-life painting and vanitas, a sombre symbol of life's transience. Blurring the border between painting and installation, Warhol filled the gallery with his flowers like a funeral parlour, allowing the series to capture the quintessential qualities of death, beauty, and celebrity which had come to epitomize his style. More acutely connecting the series to his larger practice, the 1964 Flowers series was undertaken at the same time as some of Warhol's most haunting media imagery, such as his Jackie series, made in the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination. Indeed forty-two silkscreened Jackies were hung alongside his Flowers at Leo Castelli's Gallery.
Standing in contrast, the present work from 1978 was created during a period in Warhol's career when he was re-engaging with painting in the new Post-Modern world. His explorations in paint culminated with his Reversals and Retrospective series, where he experimented with the reverse, negative, and monochrome iterations of iconic images from his own career. It was during this period of the 'New Wave' in Western culture and the passing of the baton from Modernism to an apparent Post-Modern, conceptual aesthetic that the world seemed to be in a period of retrenchment and reflection, that Warhol appears to be have become increasingly conscious of the passage of time. It was through this self-reference that Warhol became a leading practitioner of the Post-Modern aesthetic. By selecting the most pertinent iconography from his back catalogue, Warhol brought his Pop career full circle by 'trademarking' his own imagery. The meaning or significance of the present work is greatly enhanced by the viewer's awareness that Warhol specifically appropriated this image of what could be considered his first Reversal for its symbolism as a milestone from his early career. Like his reversed colour rendition of his Marilyns of the 1960s in the Reversal series from this period, Flowers of 1978 has an overarching sense of the abstract created through dichotomies of stark black and white, connecting this work to Warhol's exploration of the conceptual and abstract in his Shadows series over the next few years. In this work, Warhol creates an almost carbon-copied homage to himself and his first Flowers 1964, and in doing so, cements his place as one of the forefathers of Post-Modernity.
Warhol's first conceived silkscreen Flowers series of 1964 was the culmination of a long progression of great series by the artist from his Campbell Soup Cans and Coca-Cola Bottles, his celebrity portraits of stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, to his Death & Disaster images. The pervasive qualities of seriality, banality and emptiness in these works, in conjunction with Warhol's own admission that 'everything I was doing must have been Death', led to the sentiment that there was an overriding morbidity running through his work (A. Warhol, quoted in G.R. Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?', Art News, 62, November 1963, pp. 60-63). Following in the immediate aftermath of these seminal works and in response to Warhol finally securing a show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, his silkscreen Flowers paintings, with their day-glo colours, were widely perceived as a happier turn in the artist's oeuvre. Yet as the classic image of ephemerality, the flower belongs to a long art historical tradition of still-life painting and vanitas, a sombre symbol of life's transience. Blurring the border between painting and installation, Warhol filled the gallery with his flowers like a funeral parlour, allowing the series to capture the quintessential qualities of death, beauty, and celebrity which had come to epitomize his style. More acutely connecting the series to his larger practice, the 1964 Flowers series was undertaken at the same time as some of Warhol's most haunting media imagery, such as his Jackie series, made in the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination. Indeed forty-two silkscreened Jackies were hung alongside his Flowers at Leo Castelli's Gallery.
Standing in contrast, the present work from 1978 was created during a period in Warhol's career when he was re-engaging with painting in the new Post-Modern world. His explorations in paint culminated with his Reversals and Retrospective series, where he experimented with the reverse, negative, and monochrome iterations of iconic images from his own career. It was during this period of the 'New Wave' in Western culture and the passing of the baton from Modernism to an apparent Post-Modern, conceptual aesthetic that the world seemed to be in a period of retrenchment and reflection, that Warhol appears to be have become increasingly conscious of the passage of time. It was through this self-reference that Warhol became a leading practitioner of the Post-Modern aesthetic. By selecting the most pertinent iconography from his back catalogue, Warhol brought his Pop career full circle by 'trademarking' his own imagery. The meaning or significance of the present work is greatly enhanced by the viewer's awareness that Warhol specifically appropriated this image of what could be considered his first Reversal for its symbolism as a milestone from his early career. Like his reversed colour rendition of his Marilyns of the 1960s in the Reversal series from this period, Flowers of 1978 has an overarching sense of the abstract created through dichotomies of stark black and white, connecting this work to Warhol's exploration of the conceptual and abstract in his Shadows series over the next few years. In this work, Warhol creates an almost carbon-copied homage to himself and his first Flowers 1964, and in doing so, cements his place as one of the forefathers of Post-Modernity.