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拍品专文
Warhol’s celebrated Flowers series followed his Death and Disaster paintings of 1962-1963, in which the artist evoked some of the darkest crevasses of America’s mass consumerist culture. Having cast his insightful eye over graphic images of electric chairs, race riots and disturbing car crash incidents, in 1964 Warhol returned with Flowers, a group of paintings that would become some of the artist’s most popular. This dramatic shift seemingly marks a transition to a simpler subject matter, yet when examined more closely this unassuming motif reveals a complex, layered meaning.
Painted either in the very last days of 1964 or early in 1965, this 22-inch square canvas is from one of Warhol’s earliest iterations of his Flower series. Having worked on a number of Flower canvases in various sizes for a show at Leo Castelli’s gallery, the artist was commissioned by the legendary collectors Ethel and Robert Scull to produce a series of Flower canvases as a mural for their second home. To differentiate these canvases from the Castelli canvases, the artist produced them in this unique 22-inch format. In addition to the Scull canvases, Warhol also produced a number of extra canvases in this size for a show he was organizing at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery in Paris; this particular Flowers is one of those paintings designated for France.
These striking paintings marked a significant turning point in Warhol’s career in that these were the first works he produced under the auspices of the legendary dealer Leo Castelli. This meant that, in addition to the increased exposure of working with such a prominent figure, the artist was now exhibiting alongside other established giants of American art such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Warhol began working with the motif in the summer of 1964, two years after Castelli had initially rejected his work. The conception and initial idea to use flowers as a subject matter has been accredited to Henry Geldzahler, then the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Geldzahler’s suggestion to Warhol also came at a time when Warhol was aiming to deliver something more accessible, familiar and popular with his subject matter; a strategy that was consistent in satisfying the needs of Leo Castelli.
Through appropriating a color photograph of hibiscus flowers, originally published in a two-page spread of the 1964 issue of Modern Photography, Warhol manipulated and reproduced the imagery by cropping the photograph and rotating one of the flowers through 180 degrees to conform to the square format. The artist was drawn to the square format of the paintings because its regular shape allowed them to be hung “any side up…you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 191). After trimming the image to shapes with sharp, rigid outlines, Warhol transferred the image onto canvas via silkscreen.
As a series, Flowers was manifested in various sizes, ranging from 5 to 60 inches, and a range of colors. To differentiate the 22-inch series from those completed for the Castelli show, Warhol used a slightly smaller screen and printed directly over the white primer. Warhol then screened each canvas by hand which enabled him to produce many more canvases in a shorter period of time, in a similar fashion to the work he was preparing for the Sonnabend exhibition in Paris. Thus, Flowers continued Warhol’s fascination with the nature of mechanical reproduction through his adoption of the commercial process of screen-printing. The replication of the flowers in the image itself only emphasizes the process by which they came into being, in addition to their potential for mass production.
In selecting the color for his Flowers, Warhol deliberately chose vibrant hues of brilliant synthetic and what was known as ‘cosmetic colors’ that would effectively attract and instantly engage the viewer, causing a sensory experience. The four pink and red blossoms juxtaposed against the dense foliage of black and white present a striking image of brilliant, chromatic color contrast. Warhol color-blocked each blossom, which transformed each flower into flat, discrete, graphic forms and elements that seem to hover above the background. “When Warhol made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement. There is a lot of depth in there…You have this shadowy dark grass, which is not pretty, and then you have these big, wonderful, brightly colored flowers” (J. O’Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York, 1996, p. 61). The bright and flat imagery of the flowers evokes a simplicity that is instantly accessible and easy to broadcast; this accessibility can also be understood as a Warhol's attempt to create truly ‘popular’ art.
Although some believe this ‘popular’ imagery in Flowers was a departure from Warhol’s obsession with death, his decision to fill Castelli’s gallery with flowers proved to be one of his most complex series of work. While flowers can represent new life and beauty, they only exist at their best for a short period of time, thus alluding to life's fragility and symbolizing mourning. “In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my flower period! Like Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers, the genre” (G. Malanga, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York, 2003, p. 74). Presciently, the colors and shapes are quintessentially sixties – an early harbinger of the notoriously anti-violence, anti-war, flower power generation.
Painted either in the very last days of 1964 or early in 1965, this 22-inch square canvas is from one of Warhol’s earliest iterations of his Flower series. Having worked on a number of Flower canvases in various sizes for a show at Leo Castelli’s gallery, the artist was commissioned by the legendary collectors Ethel and Robert Scull to produce a series of Flower canvases as a mural for their second home. To differentiate these canvases from the Castelli canvases, the artist produced them in this unique 22-inch format. In addition to the Scull canvases, Warhol also produced a number of extra canvases in this size for a show he was organizing at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery in Paris; this particular Flowers is one of those paintings designated for France.
These striking paintings marked a significant turning point in Warhol’s career in that these were the first works he produced under the auspices of the legendary dealer Leo Castelli. This meant that, in addition to the increased exposure of working with such a prominent figure, the artist was now exhibiting alongside other established giants of American art such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Warhol began working with the motif in the summer of 1964, two years after Castelli had initially rejected his work. The conception and initial idea to use flowers as a subject matter has been accredited to Henry Geldzahler, then the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Geldzahler’s suggestion to Warhol also came at a time when Warhol was aiming to deliver something more accessible, familiar and popular with his subject matter; a strategy that was consistent in satisfying the needs of Leo Castelli.
Through appropriating a color photograph of hibiscus flowers, originally published in a two-page spread of the 1964 issue of Modern Photography, Warhol manipulated and reproduced the imagery by cropping the photograph and rotating one of the flowers through 180 degrees to conform to the square format. The artist was drawn to the square format of the paintings because its regular shape allowed them to be hung “any side up…you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 191). After trimming the image to shapes with sharp, rigid outlines, Warhol transferred the image onto canvas via silkscreen.
As a series, Flowers was manifested in various sizes, ranging from 5 to 60 inches, and a range of colors. To differentiate the 22-inch series from those completed for the Castelli show, Warhol used a slightly smaller screen and printed directly over the white primer. Warhol then screened each canvas by hand which enabled him to produce many more canvases in a shorter period of time, in a similar fashion to the work he was preparing for the Sonnabend exhibition in Paris. Thus, Flowers continued Warhol’s fascination with the nature of mechanical reproduction through his adoption of the commercial process of screen-printing. The replication of the flowers in the image itself only emphasizes the process by which they came into being, in addition to their potential for mass production.
In selecting the color for his Flowers, Warhol deliberately chose vibrant hues of brilliant synthetic and what was known as ‘cosmetic colors’ that would effectively attract and instantly engage the viewer, causing a sensory experience. The four pink and red blossoms juxtaposed against the dense foliage of black and white present a striking image of brilliant, chromatic color contrast. Warhol color-blocked each blossom, which transformed each flower into flat, discrete, graphic forms and elements that seem to hover above the background. “When Warhol made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement. There is a lot of depth in there…You have this shadowy dark grass, which is not pretty, and then you have these big, wonderful, brightly colored flowers” (J. O’Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York, 1996, p. 61). The bright and flat imagery of the flowers evokes a simplicity that is instantly accessible and easy to broadcast; this accessibility can also be understood as a Warhol's attempt to create truly ‘popular’ art.
Although some believe this ‘popular’ imagery in Flowers was a departure from Warhol’s obsession with death, his decision to fill Castelli’s gallery with flowers proved to be one of his most complex series of work. While flowers can represent new life and beauty, they only exist at their best for a short period of time, thus alluding to life's fragility and symbolizing mourning. “In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my flower period! Like Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers, the genre” (G. Malanga, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York, 2003, p. 74). Presciently, the colors and shapes are quintessentially sixties – an early harbinger of the notoriously anti-violence, anti-war, flower power generation.