Andy Warhol - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Rendered in varied shades of cerulean blue and phthalo green, Andy Warhol’s three canvases of cabaret singer Bobby Short from 1963 aptly capture the larger-than-life personality of the sitter. Energetic and animated, Short’s big smile jumps off the canvases, creating almost three-dimensional renderings of the figure, amplified by Warhol’s signature silkscreen technique. Using photobooth pictures as inspiration for the paintings, Warhol painted only nine canvases of Short – none of which were exhibited during the artist’s lifetime. Short himself only found out about the works following Warhol’s death in 1987, when the paintings were discovered in the artist’s studio. Today, four of the nine paintings as well as the original photobooth strip are held in the permanent collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Created during the most important decade in Warhol’s career, the Bobby Short paintings provide a rare glimpse into Warhol’s early portraiture practice which would kickstart his illustrious and prolific career.

     

    The 1960s represented a transitional period for Warhol, experimenting with the media which he used as a basis for his silkscreens. Transitioning away from the 35-mm still camera and found imagery that was used in the Elvis, Marilyn, and Death and Disaster series, Warhol began to experiment with his own source imagery. Using photobooth strips between 1963 to 1966, Warhol used this new media to take improvised pictures of his sitters, creating enigmatic, ephemeral portraits that capture the essence of the subject. His own photography would dominate his artistic production during the decade, leading ultimately to his use of the Polaroid camera in his later silkscreens.

     

    Photobooth studies of Bobby Short with Andy Warhol, 1963. Image/Artwork: © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

    A cabaret singer at the famous Café Carlyle in The Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for nearly 50 years, Bobby Short (1924–2005) was a symbol of civilized New York culture at the dawn of the second half of the century. With an audience including royalty, movie stars, presidents, and socialites, Short and his glamorous Upper Manhattan social circle stood in stark contrast to Warhol’s downtown scene. Like Warhol, however, Short was also a closeted gay man and a fixture in New York’s queer social circles. Short has said that he remembers Warhol making a drawing of him with his feet propped up against a piano, and also the photobooth session which inspired the present works. In the photobooth strip, Warhol himself appears in the first shot. The informality of such “sessions” and the resulting portraits of the singer show Short in a different light than in his performative, uptown world.

     

    Memorializing Short and his other portrait subjects in his signature silkscreens, Warhol interrogates the notion of celebrity. By transforming ephemeral images such as photobooth strips and Polaroids into portraits of famous figures, Warhol comments on the impermanence of fame. The discovery of the photobooth in particular was apt for Warhol, given that the images were produced by a coin-operated machine which anyone can access. Perhaps it was the mass-productive aspect of the photobooth which drew Warhol in, and yet, despite the machine-generated imagery, Warhol’s resulting portraits were each unique. The silkscreen process employed back in the studio, which Warhol only pioneered a year before in 1962, offered a contrast to the expressive painterly style of the historic portraiture tradition. With Warhol’s method, the hand of the artist is virtually eliminated. While it would seem that this process would render the image impersonal and unemotional, portraits like Bobby Short, which capture candid, casual moments, uniquely allow for the personality of the sitter to shine through, creating a livelier and more engaging portrait.

     

    Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1659, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.72

    Unposed, Short’s images are more approachable as compared to the traditional portraits of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Here, Short is depicted with uninhibited emotion, raw and genuine. This is heightened by Warhol’s use of pure, vibrant color for the backgrounds, situating the works distinctly in the Pop era. In subverting the traditions of portraiture and presenting a more realistic interpretation of their subject, the present works mirror the depiction of personality for which artists such as Rembrandt are so well known. Indeed, Bobby Short reflects an almost reverent attention paid by Warhol to the sitter, offering an intimate glimpse into the relationship between artist and subject, which has cemented Warhol as the most important portrait painter of the 20th century.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
      Lang Fine Art and Jane Holzer
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Andy Warhol, Portraits, May 12–October 1, 2005

    • Literature

      Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings and Sculpture 1961–1963, vol. 1, London, 2002, no. 482, pp. 423, 425 (illustrated, p. 423); no. 484, pp. 424–425 (illustrated, p. 424); no. 485, pp. 424–425 (illustrated, p. 424)
      Steven Bluttal and Dave Hickey, Andy Warhol “Giant” Size, London, 2006, pp. 262, 615 (nos. PA 55.026 and PA 55.029 illustrated, p. 262)
      Tony Shafrazi, ed., Andy Warhol Portraits, New York, 2007, pp. 38, 305 (illustrated, p. 38)

    • 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.

       

      View More Works

Property from a Private European Collection

142

Three works: (i-iii) Bobby Short

each stamped twice by the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York, initialed and numbered “VF [PA55.023, PA55.026, PA55.029]” on the overlap
silkscreen and acrylic on linen
each 20 1/8 x 15 7/8 in. (51.1 x 40.3 cm)
Executed in 1963.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024