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拍品专文
Andy Warhol’s Karen Kain is a striking example of the artist’s iconic silkscreened portraits. His subject is a celebrated former ballerina who worked with companies including the Paris Opera Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Vienna State Opera, and the National Ballet of Canada, among others. Based on a Polaroid that Warhol took of the dancer while she was visiting The Factory, the present work is the very first trial proof for the portrait executed in 1980. Emblazoned across a heather ground, Warhol’s Kain is serene and poised. A soft light illuminates her face, which is elegantly framed by her crossed hands. Her features are brought out in bold relief; Kain’s dark lips and distinctive eye shadow recall Warhol’s earlier celebrity portraits of the 1960s, for which he rendered silver-screen goddesses such as Marilyn Monroe in Day-Glo colours. Painted during Kain’s hiatus from the world of ballet, the work both captures and transcends its sitter’s biography. Shortly after it was made, Karen Kain was gifted by Warhol to the present owner, who had met the artist’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone through a friend and spent time at The Factory; the painting has been held in the same collection for the four decades since.
Karen Kain takes her place among Warhol’s ‘society portraits’, a group that included actors, athletes, musicians, and society dames, whom he depicted in his characteristically dispassionate manner from the 1970s onwards. Warhol had begun his career as a commercial illustrator, but desiring a more mechanised aesthetic, he incorporated silkscreening into his practice in the early 1960s. ‘I wanted something … that gave more of an assembly-line effect,’ he remembered. ‘With silk screening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it’ (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Celant, SuperWarhol, exh. cat. Grimaldi Forum, Monaco 2003, p. 65). For the ‘society portraits’, Warhol would take multiple Polaroids of his subject before selecting one or two images which he would reproduce using the silkscreen, always on the same 40-by-40 inch scale. Warhol created sophisticated painterly effects in these late works. As in the present example, he would often employ bold, hard-edged chromatic backdrops, and traced elements of the picture using a projector to electrify the photographic screenprint with linear detail. These vivid images immortalised a Pop who’s-who of American culture, capitalising on the public’s appetite for fame, celebrity, and glamour. Indeed, Karen Kain epitomises this atmosphere: with her bright, stunning eyes, and dark mouth, she has been reduced to her most essential elements—an object to desire and consume.
Karen Kain takes her place among Warhol’s ‘society portraits’, a group that included actors, athletes, musicians, and society dames, whom he depicted in his characteristically dispassionate manner from the 1970s onwards. Warhol had begun his career as a commercial illustrator, but desiring a more mechanised aesthetic, he incorporated silkscreening into his practice in the early 1960s. ‘I wanted something … that gave more of an assembly-line effect,’ he remembered. ‘With silk screening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it’ (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Celant, SuperWarhol, exh. cat. Grimaldi Forum, Monaco 2003, p. 65). For the ‘society portraits’, Warhol would take multiple Polaroids of his subject before selecting one or two images which he would reproduce using the silkscreen, always on the same 40-by-40 inch scale. Warhol created sophisticated painterly effects in these late works. As in the present example, he would often employ bold, hard-edged chromatic backdrops, and traced elements of the picture using a projector to electrify the photographic screenprint with linear detail. These vivid images immortalised a Pop who’s-who of American culture, capitalising on the public’s appetite for fame, celebrity, and glamour. Indeed, Karen Kain epitomises this atmosphere: with her bright, stunning eyes, and dark mouth, she has been reduced to her most essential elements—an object to desire and consume.