Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gifted from the artist; Debra Arman, Ikon Ltd., Los angeles, Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    Warhol is renowned for the many portraits he made of his fellow artist friends and celebrities. In the present lot we are presented with a slightly different angle to the art of Warhol’s portraiture. With its black and white colours and shadowed outlines, the portrait of Arman is a powerful piece within the artist’s body of work.

    Interestingly, this work is reminiscent of Warhol’s Self-Portrait of 1966-67, in which he captured himself in a similar pose – pensive and with a gaze of mysterious intensity. Whilst the light only reveals one side of their faces, their eclipsed profiles act as a barrier revealing both a private and public aspect of their persona. This idea of contouring infuses the work with an element of the austere, yet simultaneously becomes counteracted by the ironic glance of the sitter.

    Arman is one of several artists such as Joseph Beuys, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to have become subjects of Warhol’s portraits – a genre which for Warhol was a means of immortalising those around him, yet more particularly grounding himself as an artist of his time.

    As the founder of the "Nouveau Réalistes" – a movement that evolved parallel to Pop Art - Arman shares with Warhol the authority and respect reserved for "founding fathers". Perhaps this explains Warhol’s choice of depicting Arman in a similar fashion as he had depicted himself twenty years prior. The intensity of Arman’s look reveals a complicity with Warhol which is accentuated by the artists’ barely discernible smile: thus a deep mutual respect between the two artists is revealed.

  • Artist Biography

    Andy Warhol

    American • 1928 - 1987

    Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.

    Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

     

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316

Arman

1986
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas.
40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm).
Signed and dated “Andy Warhol 86” and stamped with the Authentication Board Seal "A132.076" on the overlap.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for £120,000

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London