“I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
—Andy WarholAnimated by a rapid, sketchy sense of line and bold, bright contrasts of red, pink, and green, Andy Warhol’s 1981 Dollar Sign captures the force and energy of the artist’s keen graphic sensibility, honed from his earliest days as a commercial illustrator. Deceptively simple, the composition’s looping and layered ‘S’ curves sweep across the surface of the canvas, the more loosely rendered fuchsia sign beneath offsetting and amplifying the deep dollar-bill green of the more solid upper layer. As curator Trevor Fairbrother has memorably suggested, these ‘Multiple, overlaid impressions of the motif, deliberately misaligned, make the dollar sign appear to quiver and strain like a fish thrashing in a net’, investing the late series with a vitality and ‘vivid brashness’ that stands as an artist’s statement of sorts.ⁱ

 

Indeed, there is perhaps no other motif in Warhol’s repertoire of familiar, everyday images that stands in for the artist himself as readily as the dollar sign, and it seems apt that the artist selected a fold-out triptych of Dollar Sign works to represent him in a 1982 Artforum piece on the success of certain contemporary artists. The culmination of a career-long fascination with the strange allure of fame, glamour, and commercialism, Warhol first embarked on his Dollar Sign series in 1981, although its origins can be traced back to his very earliest graphic experiments. Predating the familiar crisp visual language of Pop, an early 1950s drawing of a money-laden tree nevertheless establishes commerce and commercialism as foundational themes that the artist would go on to explore. Tellingly, his earliest silkscreened experiments in 1962 were of dollar bills, placing the motif at the very heart of Warhol’s artistic project and marking the crucial turning point in the processes that would radically reframe debates around art production and value in the second half of the 20th century.

 

As the artist explained, ‘The silk screens were really an accident […] the first one was the money painting, but that was a silk screen of a drawing. Then someone told me you could use a photographic image, and that’s how it all started.’ⁱⁱ Working throughout the 1960s, Warhol returned repeatedly to the motif, producing both large-scale, gridded compositions of multiple dollar bills and more focused studies of individual notes. In an influential 1970 essay, Calvin Tomkins provided a mythology for the motif, suggesting that a playful exchange with gallerist Muriel Latow was the catalyst for these works, with Warhol offering fifty dollars as payment for her ‘fabulous ideas’ and Latow musing that ‘Money. The thing that matters more to you than anything else in the world is money. You should paint pictures of money.’ⁱⁱⁱ Alongside his iconic, era-defining images of Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, his dollar bills are amongst his most direct and powerful images, concentrated visual representations of the American dream itself.

 
Created in 1981, the year before Warhol first presented his Dollar Signs at the legendary Leo Castelli’s Greene Street gallery, the present work highlights the sophistication of Warhol’s treatment of his primary subject. Going further than depicting paper currency as a way of talking about consumer capitalism, Dollar Sign moves beyond the object and into the realm of semiotics – the dollar sign an absolute symbol of our times and of Warhol’s own belief that ‘Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.’

More than any other artist of his generation, Warhol understood the role that the reproduced image would play in both reflecting and shaping contemporary culture; in adopting pop culture imagery and commercial printing processes, Warhol developed a visual language that communicated this phenomena. Immediately recognisable, Warhol’s motifs have become icons of 20th century art and visual culture, the Dollar Signs exemplifying in pictorial terms the dominating principles of the American century and 21^st century late-stage capitalism. In his Dollar Signs, Warhol astutely charged this universal symbol for wealth with desire, exposing the functioning of art as another commodity in an increasingly materialistic world.

 

Anthony d’Offay and Keith Hartley discuss Warhol’s Dollar Sign, National Galleries of Scotland, 2013

 

Collector's Digest 

• Warhol first started using the iconic dollar sign motif in 1981 across a series of drawings, paintings, and screen prints. The Dollar Signs were first exhibited at Leo Castelli’s Gallery in New York in 1982, the same year as the current work’s execution. 
• Other examples from this body of work are now held in notable public institutions including the Tate Collections, London and the National Galleries of Scotland. 
• The subject of major international exhibitions at the 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.

 

 

ⁱ Trevor Fairbrother, 'ABC Dollar' in Andy Warhol: Dollar Signs, exh. cat., Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York, 2004, p. 13.
ⁱⁱ Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, p. 109.
ⁱⁱⁱ George Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Vol. 1: Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, London, 2002, p. 131.