Beschreibung:

18Andy WarholFlowerssigned and dated 'ANDY WARHOL 64 Andy Warhol' on the overlap synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas 61 x 61 cm (24 x 24 in.) Executed in 1964. Full CataloguingEstimate £1,400,000 - 1,800,000 ‡ Place Advance BidContact Specialist Kate Bryan Specialist, Head of Evening Sale +44 20 7318 4026 kbryan@phillips.com
OverviewArguably one of the most recognisable paintings in the canon of Western art, Andy Warhol’s Flowers from 1964 embodies the zeitgeist of an era. The composition’s broad swath of electric green, overlaid with black shades and punctuated by four large, non-specific flowers, is at once representational and abstract, uplifting and somber. First executed in the summer of 1964, Warhol’s Flowers emerged during a transitional period within the artist’s life and career. Struck upon almost haphazardly at the suggestion of his friend, the then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Henry Geldzahler, the Flowers would inaugurate Warhol’s time at Castelli and symbolise the establishment of Pop as a global phenomenon. Probably produced in October-November 1964, shortly before they were exhibited at Castelli Gallery in November-December of that year, the iconic canvas’s 24-inch iteration was amongst the most numerous of the Flowers series, 81 in total being noted in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. Within this body of work, other examples are held in such revered institutions as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Genesis of Warhol’s Flowers In the spring of 1964, Warhol decided to leave the representation of the Stable Gallery and to join that of Leo Castelli, the grand impresario of the Pop Art movement in New York. As epitomised by his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans and his Elvis show at the Ferus Gallery in July 1962 and in September 1963, as well as his Death paintings at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in January 1964 and his Brillo Box sculptures at the Stable Gallery in April 1964, Warhol preferred to dedicate his gallery exhibitions to a single theme, subject or sequence. The summer of 1964 afforded the artist the time and space needed to conceptualise a new series that he could show at his inaugural exhibition with Castelli in the fall. While mulling over options in the Factory, he was visited by his friend Henry Geldzahler, who, according to legend, suggested to Warhol that he paint flowers. He claimed, ‘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’.i The magazine that Geldzahler had picked up was the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography in which an article described – and illustrated – a new Kodak colour processing system. The layout consisted of one image of seven hibiscus blossoms reprinted numerous times, conveying the differing effects of the system. The seriality of the spread and the subject matter seemed tailor-made to catch Warhol’s attention, which he indeed utilised as the idea for his next series. Patricia Caulfield’s pictures of hibiscus flowers on the cover and two spreads of Modern Photography, June 1964. Ever since their inception, Warhol’s Flowers cemented their position as one of the most iconic formulations of Pop imagery. Their effervescent beauty became emblematic of the rapidly changing post-war culture, and the manner in which it was manifested in social, political, and cultural realms. Unlike Warhol’s legendary subjects of that period – consumerism, celebrity, death and disasters – his corpus of Flowers was a significant departure to the realm of abstraction, not only in terms of aesthetic character, but also with regard to philosophical import. While the paintings that immediately preceded Flowers typically represented narrative facts recorded through the objectivity of the camera lens and re-contextualised through the artist's characteristic silkscreen support, this series presented a quotidian subject devoid of context. There was no story of a spectacular rise to fame or untimely death behind these petals, no self-evident critique of the agents of celebrity culture or the manipulation of collective psychology through mass-media. Even the Dollar Bills and Campbell's Soup Can pictures that pioneered Warhol’