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拍品專文
‘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 we’re 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).
‘It was well received. Very well received ... That show was all sold out. It was very easy, that was my first show of Andy’s and my first experience with Andy’
(L. Castelli, quoted in P. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, London, 1988, p. 209).
‘It was well received. Very well received ... That show was all sold out. It was very easy, that was my first show of Andy’s and my first experience with Andy’
(L. Castelli, quoted in P. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, London, 1988, p. 209).
‘They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense ...That’s why we reach for the word “genius.” Genius is what goes, “That’s not a problem.” He sees clearly. He just does it’
(P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).
Acquired from Andy Warhol’s legendary exhibition of Flower paintings at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1964, and held in the same collection ever since, the present work is an exceptional example of the 24-inch square canvases that have come to define the series. According to the artist’s catalogue raisonné, it is believed to be one of the original twenty-eight works selected to hang on a floating wall that covered the gallery’s windows facing East 77th Street. Created a few months after cementing his seminal partnership with Castelli that summer, the Flower paintings marked a major turning point within Warhol’s early practice. Having established himself as a leading figure within the Pop Art movement, Warhol began to look outside the pantheon of brand names and celebrities that had previously dominated his output, taking as his subject an unknown and seemingly innocuous image culled from a magazine. Standing as the culmination of his painterly efforts during the 1960s, the Flower paintings are among the most visually abstract and conceptually subversive of his early oeuvre. Serially-manufactured visions of nature, their deliberately flattened forms and vivid cosmetic colouring undermines the romanticism and pantheist sense of wonder usually associated with the art-historical genre of flower painting. Echoing his portraits of Marilyn, Liz and other mass-produced beauties, these brightly-coloured, vacant forms stand among the artist’s most iconic motifs. ‘They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense’, writes Peter Schjeldahl. ‘...That’s why we reach for the word “genius.” Genius is what goes, “That’s not a problem.” He sees clearly. He just does it’ (P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).
Warhol’s Flowers derived from a colour photograph of hibiscus blossoms that appeared in a two page spread in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. The curator Henry Geldzahler reportedly drew the artist’s attention to the image – initially, he claims, as an alternative to his increasingly dark subject matter. As he recalls, ‘I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death. I said, “Andy, maybe it’s enough death now” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, how about this?” I opened a magazine to four flowers’ (H. Geldzahler, quoted in unpublished interview with J. Stein, 1973, Geldzahler Papers, Beinecke Library). The photograph, taken by the magazine’s editor Patricia Caulfield, had been used to illustrate an article on a Kodak colour processor designed for amateurs. As Michael Lobel argues, ‘The magazine layout already suggests the blossoms were ripe for Warholian plucking, as one side of the foldout featured four variants of the image, the slight colour differences between them reminiscent of the repetition he had embraced in his Pop practice’ (M. Lobel, ‘In Transition: Warhol’s Flowers’, in Andy Warhol Flowers, exh. cat., Eykyn Maclean, New York, 2012, n.p.). Warhol was quick to identity the macabre overtones latent within this seemingly harmless spread. Itscheerful reproduction of petals and grass harboured a disturbing assumption: that nature, in the age of technology, was simply another commodity available for appropriation by the snap-happy consumer. Far from counteracting Warhol’s dark side, the photograph gave rise to one of the artist’s most piercing critiques of contemporary image production.
Contrary to Geldzahler’s memory, the magazine spread actually featured seven flowers, which Warhol subjected to an extensive process of manipulation in order to produce the trademark configuration of four. As well as cropping the image, Warhol deliberately shifted the placement of one of the flowers in order to fit within the boundaries of the square canvas, as well as altering the interiors of the flowers by transferring their internal silhouettes. According to Tony Scherman and David Dalton, he asked his assistant Billy Linich ‘to run the photo repeatedly through the Factory’s new photostat machine –“a dozen times, at least,” said Billy, to flatten out the blossoms, removing their definition, the shadow that lent the photo its illusion of three-dimensionality. “He didn’t want it to look like a photo at all. He just wanted the shape, the basic outline, of the flowers”’ (T. Scherman and D. Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York 2009, p. 247). For Warhol, who had grown up under the glare of Abstract Expressionism, the deliberately flat banality of the Flower paintings presented an alternative to the movement’s insistence on the transcendental nature of painting. His compression of form and colour in these works anticipates much of his later oeuvre, in particular the Shadow and Camouflage works of the late 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, however – as in the present work – the trace of the artist’s hand is still visible in the frayed edges and chromatic bleeding of the individual petals. As in Warhol’s best works, he consciously undermines his own aesthetic agenda, allowing glimpses of chance and human error to infiltrate the gaps of his production process.
Reproduced in multiple sizes between 1964 and 1965, the Flowers were among the last paintings that Warhol produced during this formative decade. Created shortly after his Death and Disaster series, they represent a grand synthesis of the themes that occupied his early oeuvre: commerce and consumerism on one hand, and mortality and corruption on the other. Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone recalled that whilst many people responded to the Flower paintings as playful works that somehow anticipated the liberating values of the flower-power movement, those closest to the artist were all too aware of their subversive implications. As he explains, ‘we all knew the dark side of those Flowers. Don’t forget, at that time, there was flower power and flower children. We were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children. Instead, we used to goof on it. We were into black leather and vinyl and whips and S&M and shooting up and speed. There was nothing flower power about that. So when Warhol and that whole scene made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement’ (R. Cutrone, quoted in J. O’ Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York 1996, p. 61). In these works, nature is stripped of its power and grandeur, packaged into a reproducible motif and thrust under the commercial spotlight. As John Coplans has written, ‘What is incredible about the best of the flower paintings is 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’ (J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, Pasadena 1970, p. 52).
(G. Malanga, quoted in D. Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, London, 2003, p. 74).
‘It was well received. Very well received ... That show was all sold out. It was very easy, that was my first show of Andy’s and my first experience with Andy’
(L. Castelli, quoted in P. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, London, 1988, p. 209).
‘It was well received. Very well received ... That show was all sold out. It was very easy, that was my first show of Andy’s and my first experience with Andy’
(L. Castelli, quoted in P. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, London, 1988, p. 209).
‘They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense ...That’s why we reach for the word “genius.” Genius is what goes, “That’s not a problem.” He sees clearly. He just does it’
(P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).
Acquired from Andy Warhol’s legendary exhibition of Flower paintings at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1964, and held in the same collection ever since, the present work is an exceptional example of the 24-inch square canvases that have come to define the series. According to the artist’s catalogue raisonné, it is believed to be one of the original twenty-eight works selected to hang on a floating wall that covered the gallery’s windows facing East 77th Street. Created a few months after cementing his seminal partnership with Castelli that summer, the Flower paintings marked a major turning point within Warhol’s early practice. Having established himself as a leading figure within the Pop Art movement, Warhol began to look outside the pantheon of brand names and celebrities that had previously dominated his output, taking as his subject an unknown and seemingly innocuous image culled from a magazine. Standing as the culmination of his painterly efforts during the 1960s, the Flower paintings are among the most visually abstract and conceptually subversive of his early oeuvre. Serially-manufactured visions of nature, their deliberately flattened forms and vivid cosmetic colouring undermines the romanticism and pantheist sense of wonder usually associated with the art-historical genre of flower painting. Echoing his portraits of Marilyn, Liz and other mass-produced beauties, these brightly-coloured, vacant forms stand among the artist’s most iconic motifs. ‘They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense’, writes Peter Schjeldahl. ‘...That’s why we reach for the word “genius.” Genius is what goes, “That’s not a problem.” He sees clearly. He just does it’ (P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).
Warhol’s Flowers derived from a colour photograph of hibiscus blossoms that appeared in a two page spread in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. The curator Henry Geldzahler reportedly drew the artist’s attention to the image – initially, he claims, as an alternative to his increasingly dark subject matter. As he recalls, ‘I looked around the studio and it was all Marilyn and disasters and death. I said, “Andy, maybe it’s enough death now” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, how about this?” I opened a magazine to four flowers’ (H. Geldzahler, quoted in unpublished interview with J. Stein, 1973, Geldzahler Papers, Beinecke Library). The photograph, taken by the magazine’s editor Patricia Caulfield, had been used to illustrate an article on a Kodak colour processor designed for amateurs. As Michael Lobel argues, ‘The magazine layout already suggests the blossoms were ripe for Warholian plucking, as one side of the foldout featured four variants of the image, the slight colour differences between them reminiscent of the repetition he had embraced in his Pop practice’ (M. Lobel, ‘In Transition: Warhol’s Flowers’, in Andy Warhol Flowers, exh. cat., Eykyn Maclean, New York, 2012, n.p.). Warhol was quick to identity the macabre overtones latent within this seemingly harmless spread. Itscheerful reproduction of petals and grass harboured a disturbing assumption: that nature, in the age of technology, was simply another commodity available for appropriation by the snap-happy consumer. Far from counteracting Warhol’s dark side, the photograph gave rise to one of the artist’s most piercing critiques of contemporary image production.
Contrary to Geldzahler’s memory, the magazine spread actually featured seven flowers, which Warhol subjected to an extensive process of manipulation in order to produce the trademark configuration of four. As well as cropping the image, Warhol deliberately shifted the placement of one of the flowers in order to fit within the boundaries of the square canvas, as well as altering the interiors of the flowers by transferring their internal silhouettes. According to Tony Scherman and David Dalton, he asked his assistant Billy Linich ‘to run the photo repeatedly through the Factory’s new photostat machine –“a dozen times, at least,” said Billy, to flatten out the blossoms, removing their definition, the shadow that lent the photo its illusion of three-dimensionality. “He didn’t want it to look like a photo at all. He just wanted the shape, the basic outline, of the flowers”’ (T. Scherman and D. Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York 2009, p. 247). For Warhol, who had grown up under the glare of Abstract Expressionism, the deliberately flat banality of the Flower paintings presented an alternative to the movement’s insistence on the transcendental nature of painting. His compression of form and colour in these works anticipates much of his later oeuvre, in particular the Shadow and Camouflage works of the late 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, however – as in the present work – the trace of the artist’s hand is still visible in the frayed edges and chromatic bleeding of the individual petals. As in Warhol’s best works, he consciously undermines his own aesthetic agenda, allowing glimpses of chance and human error to infiltrate the gaps of his production process.
Reproduced in multiple sizes between 1964 and 1965, the Flowers were among the last paintings that Warhol produced during this formative decade. Created shortly after his Death and Disaster series, they represent a grand synthesis of the themes that occupied his early oeuvre: commerce and consumerism on one hand, and mortality and corruption on the other. Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone recalled that whilst many people responded to the Flower paintings as playful works that somehow anticipated the liberating values of the flower-power movement, those closest to the artist were all too aware of their subversive implications. As he explains, ‘we all knew the dark side of those Flowers. Don’t forget, at that time, there was flower power and flower children. We were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children. Instead, we used to goof on it. We were into black leather and vinyl and whips and S&M and shooting up and speed. There was nothing flower power about that. So when Warhol and that whole scene made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement’ (R. Cutrone, quoted in J. O’ Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York 1996, p. 61). In these works, nature is stripped of its power and grandeur, packaged into a reproducible motif and thrust under the commercial spotlight. As John Coplans has written, ‘What is incredible about the best of the flower paintings is 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’ (J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, Pasadena 1970, p. 52).