'It's enough life, it's time for a little death.'
—Henry Geldzahler

Combining seriality, repetition, and the mechanical modes of production for which he became so well-known, Electric Chair is a supreme illustration of the central preoccupations of Andy Warhol’s definitive brand of American Pop art. Bringing the bright, bold colours of Pop into an immediate and jarring tension with its grisly subject matter, this set of 10 screenprints cut to the heart of the contradictions and repressed anxieties characterising mid-century American consciousness, and of Warhol’s abiding interests in the image, celebrity, death, and tragedy.

 

Collapsing moments of horror into the mechanics of the spectacle and mass-production, Electric Chair belong to Warhol’s renowned Death and Disaster series – a radical extension of his ambition for his Pop images to stand as ‘a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today.’ⁱ

 

 

Death and Disaster

 

Warhol first embarked on the Death and Disaster series in the summer of 1962 with the shocking 129 Die in Jet, a monumental blow up of the front page press photograph that had announced the tragedy in the New York Mirror on the 4th June. As in the defining Warhol portraits of Marilyn Monroe that he started working on in the same summer following her tragic suicide, the selection and reproduction of these images is highly revealing in terms of Warhol’s interests and preoccupations, and of the intersections in his mind between mass-production, celebrity, and tragedy.

 

Taking on challenging subjects related to suicide, car crashes, and the atomic bomb, Warhol found ample source material in appropriated images from newspapers and police photo archives, images whose inherent reproducibility was extended in his mechanical silkscreen process. Retaining certain qualities of these grainy photographs and their predisposition for mass-production, Warhol’s screenprinting process also introduced an element of chance, as the artist later explained:

'You pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across so that the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple – quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it.'
—Andy WarholAs a comment on the banality of evil, our capacity for great cruelty, and our desensitisation to the image, with this series Warhol began to experiment with repetition, reproducing the images repeatedly across a canvas, giving shape to his claim that  ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have an effect.’ⁱⁱ This is especially well-realised in the Death and Disaster series, where one single cataclysmic event – a fatal car crash, state-sanctioned execution, or the dropping of the atomic bomb – is presented as a series of horrifying an inescapable repetitions.

 

 

Electric Chairs

 

Closely connected to his images of everyday consumer items – his repeated Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo Boxes, and Campbell’s Soup tins - Warhol’s Electric Chair push the limits of Pop in their probing of the darker underside of the American psyche and it’s relation to mass-production, consumption, and the spectacle. Just as the endless repetition of Monroe’s promotional headshot speaks powerfully to ideas surrounding the construction and consumption of celebrity and the apparent inevitability of tragedy, the Electric Chair works highlight the overlap between death, violence, and spectacle in the American unconscious. As Philip Brophy has surmised: ‘if Warhol is about America, then the electric chair is the seat of American Culture. Like a transmogrified porch rocking chair, this fusion of Gothic American folk and maverick industrial inventiveness declares its own ingenuity as applied to the act of killing’.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Warhol produced his first Electric Chair in 1964 , shortly after the last executions by electrocution were conducted in New York state. Based on a haunting photograph 1953 of the death chamber in the infamous Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted as spies for the Soviet Union in the politically charged atmosphere of the Cold War. Widely covered in the press, the case was a scandal that cut to the heart of American paranoia and anxiety during the period, leading French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the trial as ‘a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation’, continuing ‘your country is sick with fear […] you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.’^iv

 

 

An instrument of impersonal, industrialised execution, the action of the electric chair is open to endlessly repetitious, unemotional use, the mechanisation of death made even more harrowing due to the absence of any human element in the image. Drawing obvious connections to the screenprinting process itself, Electric Chair makes manifest the underside of American consumer culture, operating according to the same mechanics of reproduction that produced the Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s Soup tins, and the cult of celebrity that so often defines the American century.

 

Commanding incredible wall power, the present work belongs to the 1971 Electric Chair portfolio, where the more closely cropped image of the chair is repeated across ten prints in a variety of Pop-infused candy pastel tones. Widely considered to be one of Warhol’s most affecting and powerful images in its quiet exposure of the horror and cruelty beneath the surface of post-war affluence and optimism, its array of ‘bright pastel colours [altering] the chair’s appearance into something barbaric, medieval, and absurd.’^v

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• The defining artist of post-war American Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s work is immediately recognisable and remains highly desirable.

 

• First created in 1964 as a silkscreen painting, Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair belongs to the artist’s renowned Death and Disaster series that he had started two years earlier.

 

• In 1971, Warhol created a series of colourful screenprints which replicated the initial image. The majority of the electric chair depictions are kept in major collections such as the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. This is undoubtedly why the image is so powerful and the reason this portfolio is the best known from the Death and Disasters series.

 

• The subject of major international exhibitions at Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, Warhol’s work is also held in the permanent collections of the most important institutions worldwide.

 

Death and Disaster: Vincent Fremont on Andy Warhol’s Clairvoyant Vision of American Violence filmed ahead of Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Evening Sale, November 2018, New York.

ⁱ Andy Warhol, quoted in ‘New Talent USA’, Art in America, 50, no. 1, 1962, p. 42. 
ⁱⁱ Andy Warhol, quoted in ‘What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters’, Art News, November 1963. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Philip Brophy, ‘Die Warhol Die’, Andy Warhol, (exh. cat.), South Brisbane, 2007, p. 73.
^iv Jean Paul Sartre, quoted in Walter Scheir, Invitation to an Inquest, New York, 1983, p. 254. 
^v Donna de Salvo, ‘God Is In The Details: The Prints of Andy Warhol’, in Frayda Feldman and Claudia Defendi, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962 – 1987, New York, 2003, p. 24 – 25.