Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York

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  • Provenance

    The Estate of Andy Warhol, New York; Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York; Private Collection

  • Exhibited

    Munich, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Andy Warhol: the Last Supper, May 27 – September 27, 1998; New York, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, June, 1999 – July, 2001

  • Literature

    C. Schulz-Hoffmann, C. Thierolf, and Staatsgalerie moderner Kunsts, eds., Andy Warhol: the Last Supper, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1998, cat. no. 1, p. 56 (illustrated); J. D. Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol, New York, 1998, p. 89 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    The Eighties were a very productive time for Andy artistically. He created many compelling painting series during the last six years of his life, includingOxidation, Rorschach, Camouflage, Zetigeist, Retrospective/ Reversal,Lenin, Human Heart, Self Portrait, and The Last Supper. He wasnot afraid to do what he wanted to do, even as he was reprimanded for beingtoo social, too commercial, or too mainstream. He was always an outsiderat the center of the culture that he helped to transform and his late work is atestament to his boundless talent, vision, and creative energy.Vincent Fremont, taken from R. Dergan and L. Neri, eds., Andy Warhol,NewYork, 2006, p. 16AndyWarhol, The Last Supper, 1986.After having revolutionized the very nature of the artistic avant-garde in the1960s, survived a near-fatal gunshot wound, and reemerged as the world’smost celebrated celebrity portraitist in the 1970s, the 1980s saw AndyWarhol embark on a variety of different projects. Following in the footstepsof the late Italian proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, whomWarhol greatlyadmired, he spent time during what would be his last years revisiting hisearly body of work, producing revised versions of his best known Poppaintings for the Reversals/Retrospectives series. Not content to simplyretread over old territory, in the ‘80sWarhol also found renewed relevanceand artistic rejuvenation in the form of collaborations with emerging artstars such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Francesco Clemente.Perhaps the most significant of his late accomplishments, however, was hisreturn to hand-painting coinciding with the increasingly religious thematicthrust to his work, a combination of developments that resulted in themonumental Last Supper series of paintings,Warhol’s last major body ofwork and one possessed of an uncanny gravitas in the wake of the artist’searly death in 1987.Warhol, of course, is best remembered for his iconic multiples of pop culturefigures and advertising imagery, not his religious artwork; hisplace in history is as the progenitor of Pop and the ringleader of the drugaddledcelebrity circus known asThe Factory, not as a devout Catholic.Yet unbeknownst even to many in his inner circle,Warhol attended massregularly at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on 5th Avenue and 90th Street,routinely volunteered distributing food to the homeless and destitute, andeven received Pope John Paul II’s personal blessing on April 1st, 1980 duringa trip to theVatican City in Rome. By the mid-1980s religious iconographyhad already begun to rub shoulders with the profane emblems and logos ofcapitalism inWarhol’s visual vocabulary, most notably in the works from hislate black-and-white series of silkscreen prints. It was in the Last Supperseries, however, commissioned in 1986 by longtimeWarhol patron AlexanderIolas to be installed across the street from Leonardo DaVinci’s famous LastSupper fresco in Milan, thatWarhol’s heretofore private religiouspreoccupation would manifest itself most spectacularly in his artwork.ForWarhol, the opportunity to use DaVinci’s hugely famous and ubiquitouslyreproduced Last Supper painting as the source material for a massive seriesof silkscreened prints and paintings was a chance to engage with theperfect storm of his obsessions, his personal piety and the secular power ofimages reproduced and disseminated into the varied channels of our visualculture: “Looking both ways, at the highest sacred art and at the lowliestcommercial design, and fusing them in his hallmark fashion, these late pictures seem to suggest that, for a Pop god, the meek and poor inspirit among artists are no less important than Raphael or Leonardo….The significance of Warhol’s late black-and-white works based onadvertising images and lettering is perhaps most apparent in these muralscalehybrids of the sacred and profane: the black-and-white images areWarhol’s final subversive lexicon of street art images awaiting transpositioninto art gallery and museum contexts where they will expand post-Pop,postmodern taste,” (C. Stuckey, Andy Warhol: Heaven and Hell Are Just OneBreath Away! Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984-1986, NewYork, 1992,pp. 28-31).The Last Supper/Be a Somebody With a Body, 1986, is a part of the LastSupper series in whichWarhol traced onto a canvas the projection of adetail from a simple schematic outline drawing of Da Vinci’s painting foundin an artist’s manual, a technique he picked up from his collaborations withBasquiat in the early 1980s. In trueWarhol fashion, his fascination with thisreligious icon is firmly juxtaposed with his understanding of the power of avisual cliché and his reverence for the superstar-producing mechanisms ofAmerican popular culture and media—here, the traced outline of the figureof Christ sits atop the heroic bust of campy action hero Sylvester Stallone,an advertising inspired image produced earlier that year for Be a SomebodyWith a Body, 1986.“Advertising logos… are superimposed on the figures of Christ and theApostles, creating a hybrid of the sacred and profane, high art andcommercial design.The seemingly heretical irreverence for thesedistinctions reflects the inevitable transformation of a deeply religiouswork into a cliché whose spiritual message has become muted throughrepetition. AsWarhol’s final series,The Last Supper serves as a powerfulreiteration of the principles that informed his entire artistic enterprise,”(C. Schmuckli, Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, NewYork, 1999).

  • 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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49

Andy Warhol

Detail of the Last Supper / Be Somebody with a Body

1985-1986
Acrylic on canvas.
49 3/4 x 60 1/4 in. (126.4 x 153 cm).
Numbered “PA10.300” by the Estate of Andy Warhol on the overlap.

Estimate
$1,000,000 - 1,500,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York