Image: © 2011 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
An eruption is an overwhelming image, an extraordinary happening and even a great piece of sculpture.
 
- Andy Warhol
 
(Vesuvius by Warhol, Naples, 1985, p. 35)
 
The present work is from Warhol’s Vesuvius Cycle, a series of 18 canvases depicting the activity of the world famous Neapolitan volcano erupting. Realized for a solo exhibition in the prestigious Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, a sacred space typically reserved for the old masters and classical Italianate landscapes, this work cannot help but engage with both world history and art history. In contrast to the impressionist treatment of this same subject, here Warhol translates the image into a stylized sign. Reinterpreting tradition, Warhol manipulates and inflects this Neapolitan and Romantic motif with his bravura line and overtly contemporary lexicon. Vesuvius simultaneously enshrines in an energetic and dynamic composition the essential, unconquerable force of this most iconic Neapolitan landmark, the great passion of the city that thrives beneath it and the passionate personality of the foremost Neapolitan dealer of his time and close friend of the artist who commissioned the series, Lucio Amelio.
Four years prior, Amelio had commissioned works from a group of artists including Warhol, Joseph Beuys and Keith Haring for an exhibition entitled Terrae Motus, a plea for art against the destruction of nature. This show was planned in reaction to the earthquake that occurred in November 1980 just south of Naples, which claimed the lives of over 2,700 people and devastated the surrounding area. Terrae Motus not only placed Naples firmly on the Contemporary Art World map, but also made a lasting impression on Warhol, from his experience of the city and his encounter with Beuys. In Vesuvius, Warhol recalls the sense of disaster that described the earlier exhibition and invokes the icon of natural beauty and threat of destruction that renders Naples, an extraordinary and unique place, as his subject.
Executed towards the end of the artist’s career, this series also bears witness to Warhol’s departure from the screen-printing process for which he became famous in the 1960s and his return to hand painting. Here, after some twenty years, Warhol’s expressive and spontaneous touch can be seen. Warhol himself explained that he painted Vesuvius by hand and always used different colors so that they consistently give the impression of having been painted just minutes after the eruption. Interestingly, this practice of employing expressionistic brushwork over a flat, silk-screened ground, is “an inversion of the technique used in earlier series, such as the Reversals and Ladies and Gentlemen, where Warhol had applied the flat, democratizing surface of the silkscreen over the brushy, drippy background. Through this exceptionally rare technique, the power of this image is instantly felt.” (Vesuvius by Warhol, Naples, 1985, p. 35)
Throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, two overarching themes emerge: the legacy of art history and the omnipotence of death. The present work is significant in its incorporation of both. On the one hand an image of life affirming vitality, Vesuvius, with its creeping threat of impending precariousness and destructive catastrophe, is simultaneously laced with the theme of tragedy and morbidity that permeates Warhol’s entire oeuvre, revisiting the haunting contemplation of death so sensationally depicted in the Suicides, Disasters, Car Crashes and Electric Chairs from the early 1960’s. The volcano itself has become an icon, like Marilyn or Elvis or Jackie, but unlike them, Vesuvius remains vibrantly active.
Conferring on the past a rejuvenated pertinence to the present, Vesuvius can be seen in the greater context of Warhol’s other appropriations from his Art After Art series, including his Mona Lisa works and The Scream (after Edvard Munch), reiterating and reaffirming his essential position within art history. Warhol, like the eruption itself, was an overwhelming and extraordinary artist who forever changed the landscape of art history.