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拍品专文
'What is incredible about the best of the flower paintingsis that they present a distillation of much of the strength of Warhol's art - the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer's gaze. The garish and brilliantly coloured flowers always gravitate toward the surrounding blackness and finally end up in a sea of morbidity. No matter how much ones wishes these flowers to remain beautiful they perish under one's gaze, as if haunted by death.' (J. Coplans, 'Andy Warhol: The Art', Andy Warhol, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Musuem 1970, p. 52).
With its four petals bursting from the surface of the canvas with passionate full-bodied flashes of deep scarlet, Andy Warhol's Flowers is one of the most iconic and admired images he ever produced. With this work Warhol skillfully marries together the old and the new; the venerable tradition of the floral still life and updates it by his use of the silkscreen process - still a revolutionary process in the year this work was produced. But, as with Warhol's best work, Flowers also has a darker, more melancholic quality to it. The brief nature of a flower's life appealed to Warhol's fascination with death and represented for him a very personal affinity with the temporary nature of life. As such, Flowers, is almost unique amongst Warhol's body of work in that in contains almost all the elements of his own very complex character.
Warhol was at the height of his creative powers when he conceived the Flowers series in the summer of 1964. Produced for his first exhibition with his new dealer, Leo Castelli, the show was an immediate success and sold out. The original idea for the series came from a curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Henry Geldzahler. Frustrated with the artist's morbid obsession with death and having spent months working on his Death and Disaster series, Geldzahler suggested to Warhol that he try his hand at something different. He pointed to a photograph of flowers in Modern Photography magazine, which Warhol in his deadpan style immediately seized upon as his subject.
The flower as an image had numerous attractions for Warhol. In its purest sense it was banal, superficial and above all enchantingly beautiful. The bold aesthetics of this particular image meant that it was also particularly suited to Warhol's recent adoption of the silkscreen process. Warhol had already declared that he wanted to be a machine and 'remove' himself completely from the artistic process. Although, superficially, the silkscreen process allowed him to do this, Warhol's role as an artist is still clearly visible in terms of composition and execution as the final version of the image that appears in the present lot is markedly different from the original photograph. In a move that is very characteristic of his sharp eye for visual detail, Warhol cropped the image to achieve the desired square format. In order for the flowers to fit within his new composition he had to rotate one of the original blossoms, as evidenced by the slight disruption in the background grass pattern. The square format also appealed to Warhol's aesthetic as it distanced his work from the traditional orientation of the portrait or landscape shaped canvases. This new, square format denies the viewer a fixed way of looking at the work, giving instead four possible orientations.
Although inherently modern in terms of its execution, Flowers follows in the noble art-historical tradition of still life paintings. George Malanga, a close associate of Warhol's who was directly involved in the development of the Flowers series recognised the irony of the situation. '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 were 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).
But for Warhol these images had a deeper resonance than mere aesthetics. The present work comes immediately after his Death and Disaster series of 1962-63 and superficially at least this new work, with its bright colours, visual vitality and apparent celebration of life, couldn't be more different from his gruesome images of car crashes and suicides. Despite its superficial beauty however the image also belies a darker side, an aspect that is accentuated by the particular use of the red and black colour combination of the present lot. The red colour of the petals spills out across the black canvas is reminiscent of the pools of blood that were common in many of Warhol's earlier canvases that featured car crashes and other acts of violence. Warhol spent much of his career striving to capture on canvas the fleeting nature of both fame and life and with Flowers he found the perfect vehicle for doing so. Colourful, vibrant and full of life, the hibiscus flowers featured in the present lot are only short lived. This powerful metaphor for Warhol's own life makes this particular work all the more poignant.
With its four petals bursting from the surface of the canvas with passionate full-bodied flashes of deep scarlet, Andy Warhol's Flowers is one of the most iconic and admired images he ever produced. With this work Warhol skillfully marries together the old and the new; the venerable tradition of the floral still life and updates it by his use of the silkscreen process - still a revolutionary process in the year this work was produced. But, as with Warhol's best work, Flowers also has a darker, more melancholic quality to it. The brief nature of a flower's life appealed to Warhol's fascination with death and represented for him a very personal affinity with the temporary nature of life. As such, Flowers, is almost unique amongst Warhol's body of work in that in contains almost all the elements of his own very complex character.
Warhol was at the height of his creative powers when he conceived the Flowers series in the summer of 1964. Produced for his first exhibition with his new dealer, Leo Castelli, the show was an immediate success and sold out. The original idea for the series came from a curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Henry Geldzahler. Frustrated with the artist's morbid obsession with death and having spent months working on his Death and Disaster series, Geldzahler suggested to Warhol that he try his hand at something different. He pointed to a photograph of flowers in Modern Photography magazine, which Warhol in his deadpan style immediately seized upon as his subject.
The flower as an image had numerous attractions for Warhol. In its purest sense it was banal, superficial and above all enchantingly beautiful. The bold aesthetics of this particular image meant that it was also particularly suited to Warhol's recent adoption of the silkscreen process. Warhol had already declared that he wanted to be a machine and 'remove' himself completely from the artistic process. Although, superficially, the silkscreen process allowed him to do this, Warhol's role as an artist is still clearly visible in terms of composition and execution as the final version of the image that appears in the present lot is markedly different from the original photograph. In a move that is very characteristic of his sharp eye for visual detail, Warhol cropped the image to achieve the desired square format. In order for the flowers to fit within his new composition he had to rotate one of the original blossoms, as evidenced by the slight disruption in the background grass pattern. The square format also appealed to Warhol's aesthetic as it distanced his work from the traditional orientation of the portrait or landscape shaped canvases. This new, square format denies the viewer a fixed way of looking at the work, giving instead four possible orientations.
Although inherently modern in terms of its execution, Flowers follows in the noble art-historical tradition of still life paintings. George Malanga, a close associate of Warhol's who was directly involved in the development of the Flowers series recognised the irony of the situation. '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 were 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).
But for Warhol these images had a deeper resonance than mere aesthetics. The present work comes immediately after his Death and Disaster series of 1962-63 and superficially at least this new work, with its bright colours, visual vitality and apparent celebration of life, couldn't be more different from his gruesome images of car crashes and suicides. Despite its superficial beauty however the image also belies a darker side, an aspect that is accentuated by the particular use of the red and black colour combination of the present lot. The red colour of the petals spills out across the black canvas is reminiscent of the pools of blood that were common in many of Warhol's earlier canvases that featured car crashes and other acts of violence. Warhol spent much of his career striving to capture on canvas the fleeting nature of both fame and life and with Flowers he found the perfect vehicle for doing so. Colourful, vibrant and full of life, the hibiscus flowers featured in the present lot are only short lived. This powerful metaphor for Warhol's own life makes this particular work all the more poignant.