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

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly formt the artist

  • Literature

    F. Feldman and J. Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne 1962-1987, New York, 2003, pp.76-77, [II. 64-73] illustrated

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Warhol’s garish and brilliantly colored Flowers always gravitate toward the surrounding blackness and finally end in a sea of morbidity. No matter how much one wishes these Flowers to remain beautiful they perish under one’s gaze, as if haunted by death.”
    (J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York, 1978, pp.52)

    “With the Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my Flower period! Like Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers, the genre.”
    (G. Malanga in A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York, 2003, p.74).

    Yet unlike the Old Masters, Warhol deliberately rejected any hierarchical composition as well as complex color harmonies, choosing a square format and synthetic, unnatural colors: “I like painting on a square because you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square.” (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p.191). Opposed to such simplicity however, the Flowers reflect a theme common to much of Warhol’s works – that is, the subversive and subliminal reference to the presence of death in life, making the Flower the most abstract works Warhol produced in the 1960s and 1970s.

  • 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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318

Flowers (Portfolio of 10)

1970
Portfolio of 10 screenprints on paper.
36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm) each.
Each stamped with the Authentication Board Seal and numbered “A.174. 066”. This work is from an edition of 250 plus 26 artist's proofs lettered A-Z an an unnumbered set of additional proofs for the published edition. This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board.

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for £240,000

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London