Andy Warhol in his studio with flowers © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Andy Warhol said they were pretty: Flowers, the rarely complete portfolio of 1970, was Warhol's decorative, even rebellious, response to the linear and all-over approach of then-fashionable modernist painting. Floral paintings papered over the gallery walls in his coveted debut show with New York's Leo Castelli. The garden flourished ever larger the next year in Paris with a boundless installation of floral paintings at Sonnabend Gallery.
Flowers served up a rainbow spectrum of technicolor possibilities; Warhol's budding blossoms evoked self-improvement, that most American enterprise. The hypnotic repetition of this flowery image that was clipped from a magazine mimicked the obsessive nature of a postwar public—inundated with images of opulence both on television as well as in printed ads—that was fixated like never before on beauty.
The hypnotic repetition of this flowery image...mimicked the obsessive nature of a postwar public
At attraction's apex, these hibiscuses were most vulnerable, blooming in abundance for just fleeting moments—much like Warhol's favorite movie stars. Only after some demise would he capture Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. These ten screenprints, which comprise Lot 70 in our upcoming New York Editions & Works on Paper sale on 17 October, were a clique of inevitably fading beauties verging upon surreal.
At Factory Additions, Andy Warhol engineered the ephemeral into the immortal and ordinary into grandeur—no more so than in this wall-to-wall garden that alchemized commonplace florals into fresh buds that bloom on forever.