Andy Warhol Flowers 1964 synthetic polymer, silkscreen ink on canvas 35.6 x 35.6 cm (14 x 14 in.) Signed 'ANDY WARHOL 64' on the overlap. Stamped by the 'Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board Ltd. and numbered 'A112.965' on the overlap.
Provenance Ileana Sonnabend, Paris Fred Hughes, New York Thomas Amman Fine Art, Zurich Heiner Bastian, Berlin Stellan Holm, New York Peder Bonnier Gallery, New York Exhibited Paris, Sonnabend Gallery, Andy Warhol Flowers, May 1965 Literature N. Frei, G. Prinz (eds.), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings and Sculpture 1964-1969, vol. 02B, New York, 2004, n.p, no. 1535 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Andy Warhol’s Flowers are some of the most remarkable images of his career. Conceived in 1964, their opening exhibition at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery saw the artist blossom to international stardom. The series is a gorgeous embodiment of some of Warhol’s most enduring themes: these are flowers of mass-production, beauty, and death. There is a rich history of flowers in art. David Bourdon likened Warhol’s to ‘cut out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet's lily pond’ (David Bourdon, The Village Voice, 3 December 1964); this wistful image captures a sense of the array of floral referents Warhol could draw upon. Long weighted with symbolic associations of transience, sensuality and glory, flowers play an important role in European vanitas still life paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. These arrangements often appear on the surface to be a celebration of material wealth or natural beauty, but contain pointed references to death and decay. Strewn among skulls, rotten fruit and hourglasses, the fast-fading splendour of flowers made them potent symbols of the evanescence of all worldly things. Warhol’s flowers convey a similar vulnerability. Hovering above a dark and deeply textural grassy background, their flatly vivid colour appears on the verge of burning out or being swallowed up. Created shortly after Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a vast mural of criminals’ portraits that was his controversial contribution to the 1964 World’s Fair, the flowers look like a self-conscious riposte to this sort of dark subject matter. Yet they may have more in common with such works than is at first obvious; Warhol was fascinated by death, and particularly by its desensitising repetition in images of the mass media. His long-running Death and Disaster pieces, begun in 1962, saw images of rioting, car crashes, suicides and other tragedies appropriated from newspapers and tabloids. His awareness of mortality was only heightened after the 1968 attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas, and the vanitas tradition receives a clear nod in a 1976 series of skulls; the Guns and Knives of the early eighties add another autobiographical layer to the still life as self-portrait. Viewed in this context, the flowers, for all their brightness, take on a funerary quality. Ronnie Cutrone Warhol’s studio assistant for many years, adds another insight to the flowers as products of a particular era. He reads the ‘shadowy dark grass’ behind big, colourful blooms as allegorical of Warhol’s own cultural position – an image of grittiness heightened by the total monochrome treatment of the undergrowth in the present lot. ‘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.’ (Ronnie Cutrone in John O’Connor and Benjamin Liu (eds.) Unseen Warhol, New York: Rizzoli, 1996, p. 61). Indeed, Warhol’s stint as manager for the Velvet Underground associated him with a raw and nihilistic subculture that would prove influential in the attitudes of punk music – a far cry from the optimism of ‘flower power.’ Importantly, of course, and unlike a traditional still life painter, Warhol did not work from life. His Flowers are based on a photograph published in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photog
Andy Warhol Flowers 1964 synthetic polymer, silkscreen ink on canvas 35.6 x 35.6 cm (14 x 14 in.) Signed 'ANDY WARHOL 64' on the overlap. Stamped by the 'Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board Ltd. and numbered 'A112.965' on the overlap.
Provenance Ileana Sonnabend, Paris Fred Hughes, New York Thomas Amman Fine Art, Zurich Heiner Bastian, Berlin Stellan Holm, New York Peder Bonnier Gallery, New York Exhibited Paris, Sonnabend Gallery, Andy Warhol Flowers, May 1965 Literature N. Frei, G. Prinz (eds.), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings and Sculpture 1964-1969, vol. 02B, New York, 2004, n.p, no. 1535 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Andy Warhol’s Flowers are some of the most remarkable images of his career. Conceived in 1964, their opening exhibition at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery saw the artist blossom to international stardom. The series is a gorgeous embodiment of some of Warhol’s most enduring themes: these are flowers of mass-production, beauty, and death. There is a rich history of flowers in art. David Bourdon likened Warhol’s to ‘cut out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet's lily pond’ (David Bourdon, The Village Voice, 3 December 1964); this wistful image captures a sense of the array of floral referents Warhol could draw upon. Long weighted with symbolic associations of transience, sensuality and glory, flowers play an important role in European vanitas still life paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. These arrangements often appear on the surface to be a celebration of material wealth or natural beauty, but contain pointed references to death and decay. Strewn among skulls, rotten fruit and hourglasses, the fast-fading splendour of flowers made them potent symbols of the evanescence of all worldly things. Warhol’s flowers convey a similar vulnerability. Hovering above a dark and deeply textural grassy background, their flatly vivid colour appears on the verge of burning out or being swallowed up. Created shortly after Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a vast mural of criminals’ portraits that was his controversial contribution to the 1964 World’s Fair, the flowers look like a self-conscious riposte to this sort of dark subject matter. Yet they may have more in common with such works than is at first obvious; Warhol was fascinated by death, and particularly by its desensitising repetition in images of the mass media. His long-running Death and Disaster pieces, begun in 1962, saw images of rioting, car crashes, suicides and other tragedies appropriated from newspapers and tabloids. His awareness of mortality was only heightened after the 1968 attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas, and the vanitas tradition receives a clear nod in a 1976 series of skulls; the Guns and Knives of the early eighties add another autobiographical layer to the still life as self-portrait. Viewed in this context, the flowers, for all their brightness, take on a funerary quality. Ronnie Cutrone Warhol’s studio assistant for many years, adds another insight to the flowers as products of a particular era. He reads the ‘shadowy dark grass’ behind big, colourful blooms as allegorical of Warhol’s own cultural position – an image of grittiness heightened by the total monochrome treatment of the undergrowth in the present lot. ‘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.’ (Ronnie Cutrone in John O’Connor and Benjamin Liu (eds.) Unseen Warhol, New York: Rizzoli, 1996, p. 61). Indeed, Warhol’s stint as manager for the Velvet Underground associated him with a raw and nihilistic subculture that would prove influential in the attitudes of punk music – a far cry from the optimism of ‘flower power.’ Importantly, of course, and unlike a traditional still life painter, Warhol did not work from life. His Flowers are based on a photograph published in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photog
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