59
Andy Warhol
Hammer and Sickle: one plate (see F. & S. 163)
- Estimate
- $20,000 - 30,000
Further Details
“I guess I’ve been influenced by everybody. But that’s good. That’s Pop.”With Hammer and Sickle, Warhol proves once again to be the premier iconoclast of the 20th century, demonstrating his unique ability to raise ideological, historical and social issues within a single striking image. Engaging with the Communist symbol, Warhol deprives the hammer and sickle of its usual stern aura and transforms it into an attractive, abstracted object, flanked by pops of red, yellow and orange atop a sky-blue background. If his first controversial Brillo Soap Pad boxes were aimed at destabilizing the threshold between high and low culture – undermining Clement Greenberg’s modernist separation of art and kitsch –Hammer and Sickle goes even further in conflating mass-produced imagery with propaganda. To Warhol, both the Brillo Soap Pad boxes and the hammer and sickle are nothing more than items made to sell: whether an object or an idea, it makes no difference.—Andy Warhol
First adopted by the Red Army and later incorporated into the Soviet Union’s national flag, the crossed hammer and sickle were meant to symbolize unity between industrial and agricultural laborers working together for the state. For his Hammer and Sickle series, Warhol dismantled this Communist icon into its components, arranging the tools into different compositions which were then photographed by his assistant Ronnie Cutrone. Inspired by Italian hammer and sickle graffiti seen during a trip to Naples, Warhol had originally asked Cutrone to track down images of the symbol in local bookstores. But the book images proved to be, in his words, too flat or too graphic, as Cutrone recalls: “The answer was to go down to Canal Street, into a hardware store, and buy a real hammer and sickle. Then I could shoot them, lit with long, menacing shadows, and add the drama that was missing from the flat-stenciled book versions… It always amused me that Andy, the ultimate Capitalist, and me, the ultimate Libertarian, could be suspected of Communist activity.”i
The result was a large body of work in which the artist experimented with different solutions, just as if moving objects in an ordinary still life composition. As such, Hammer and Sickle exemplifies Warhol’s strengths in recontextualizing popular symbols to imagine them from an aesthetic point of view, exposing the blurred lined between propaganda and art.
i Quoted in Hammer and Sickle, exh. cat., C&M Arts, New York, 2002.
Full-Cataloguing
Andy Warhol
American | B. 1928 D. 1987Andy 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.