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拍品专文
Dating to the mid 1970s, Andy Warhol's Skull paintings are among the artist's finest achievement of that decade. Skull is such a work: a powerful and tragic utterance. The painting is stark. The profuseness of Warhol's sixties paintings-with their Marilyns and car crashes and aisles of Campbell soup cans-has been replaced, extinguished perhaps, by the image of a human skull, staring mutely and hugely from the canvas.
The work is particularly harrowing, even for the Skull series. The work has a confidence-rattling power that is attributable-but not entirely explained-by Warhol's use of color: roman red starkly set against brown and black. Death of course, was a major theme of Warhol's art. But looking at Skull there is a sense of Warhol interrupting, if only for a moment, his deadpan acts and surface vacuity, for a profound and troubling meditation on death. Warhol is normally such a 'cool' surveyor of the Car Crash and Electric Chair paintings, that one sometimes forgets that the artist was at one time also a deeply devout Roman Catholic. In fact, Skull belongs to a tradition of Memento mori in European Religious Art, from the spectral blur of Holbein's "The Ambassadors" to the upturned skulls of Dutch still life, silent in their reprieve. A scarred veteran of the proceeding decade, Warhol's sense of tragedy and the fleet of vanity was hard won, coming, as it did, after the artist's near-death experience in 1968.
In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) Warhol wrote that "During the 60s, I think people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me." (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), New York, 1975, p. 27). This time, one needn't believe the master's bluff. A sense of the tragic gives the Skull paintings their singular place in Warhol's oeuvre, and Skull so much of its power.
The work is particularly harrowing, even for the Skull series. The work has a confidence-rattling power that is attributable-but not entirely explained-by Warhol's use of color: roman red starkly set against brown and black. Death of course, was a major theme of Warhol's art. But looking at Skull there is a sense of Warhol interrupting, if only for a moment, his deadpan acts and surface vacuity, for a profound and troubling meditation on death. Warhol is normally such a 'cool' surveyor of the Car Crash and Electric Chair paintings, that one sometimes forgets that the artist was at one time also a deeply devout Roman Catholic. In fact, Skull belongs to a tradition of Memento mori in European Religious Art, from the spectral blur of Holbein's "The Ambassadors" to the upturned skulls of Dutch still life, silent in their reprieve. A scarred veteran of the proceeding decade, Warhol's sense of tragedy and the fleet of vanity was hard won, coming, as it did, after the artist's near-death experience in 1968.
In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) Warhol wrote that "During the 60s, I think people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me." (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), New York, 1975, p. 27). This time, one needn't believe the master's bluff. A sense of the tragic gives the Skull paintings their singular place in Warhol's oeuvre, and Skull so much of its power.