“[…] violence and death, American-style, have always provided a sinister undertow to Warhol’s art.”
—Robert Rosenblum A powerful and blunt symbol of the violence that continues to characterise so much of our modern world, Andy Warhol’s Guns combines the artist’s astute understanding of the iconographic power of everyday, consumer items with his own, more complex relationship to questions of mortality and death. With a forensic detachment, Warhol magnifies and closely crops the titular objects here, the source image reproduced and rotated so that the two pistols appear interlocked with one another, emphasised through simple but stark contrasts of red, black, and white. Created in 1981, the present work belongs to Warhol’s late series of Guns paintings, examples of which now reside in the permanent collections of major institutions including the Tate Collection in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Closely related to the contemporaneous Knife paintings and the more conceptual Oxidation and Shadow paintings, this late series highlights Warhol’s profound sensitivity to images, and his singular ability to transform them into powerful, provocative symbols of an American post-war landscape shaped by commodity consumption, the cult of celebrity, and the strangely intertwined existence of glamour, tragedy, and everyday violence. 

Death and Disaster

 
Even in Warhol’s iconic images of Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy, tragedy and violence operate in direct dialogue with beauty and fame, connections made all the more explicit when the artist first embarked on his Death and Disaster series in 1962, just months before completing his first silkscreened portraits of Monroe. Taken from a sensational front-page tabloid headline, 129 Die in Crash marked the beginning of this important series, and inaugurated the critical role played by thematic treatments of death and violence in Warhol’s practice as serially repeated images of car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs took their place alongside the smiling faces of celebrities and Campbell’s Soup cans. 

 

Although Warhol’s childhood had been marked by sickness and physical frailty, in 1968 the artist suffered a shocking confrontation with gun violence and his own mortality when he was shot at close range by Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist and Factory-goer whose SCUM Manifesto called for ‘civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females’ to ‘overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.’ⁱ Near-fatal, this assassination attempt would haunt Warhol for the rest of his life, leaving him deeply scarred in both physical and psychological terms, twinned conditions sensitively captured in Alice Neel’s moving 1970 portrait, and in his own series of Skulls from 1976. 
“[...] as I was putting the phone down, I heard a loud exploding noise and whirled around: I saw Valerie pointing a gun at me and I realized she'd just fired it. I said "No! No, Valerie! Don't do it!" and she shot at me again. I dropped down to the floor as if I'd been hit I didn't know if I actually was or not. I tried to crawl under the desk. She moved in closer, fired again, and then I felt horrible, horrible pain, like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.”
—Andy WarholAs Victor Bockris has suggested, the pistol depicted here and in other works from the series created little over a decade after the attack is in fact ‘the same snub-nosed .32 that Valerie Solanas had shot him with.’ⁱⁱ Taken together, the Guns paintings thus stand as a powerful record of individual and collective trauma, touching not only on Warhol’s own experience, but as representative of the shocking acts of violence that punctuated the last decades of the 20th century with assassination attempts on presidents, prominent civil rights activists, and cultural icons like John Lennon. If movie stars and the cult of celebrity defined Warhol’s idea of 20th-century glamour, his images of the tools of violence - electric chairs, knives, guns - draw out the darker underside of the so-called ‘American century’, evoking Warhol’s familiar visual language of fetishised everyday commodities to expose the banality and ubiquity of this violence lurking just beneath the surface. Tellingly, Warhol had originally envisioned presenting his Guns and Knives alongside his Dollar Sign paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in January 1982; although the former were removed from the show at the last minute, the close conceptual connections made by the artist between these distinct bodies of work speaks powerfully to Warhol’s vision of contemporary American culture and the convergence of money, consumerism, power, and violence.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• The pioneer of Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s use of printing as a means of reproducing and repeating images to explore art history and mass media is instantly recognisable and continues to define 21st-century art.
• Resonating with key thematic treatments of death, violence, and the symbols of our modern life that structure Warhol’s corpus, Guns also touches on certain autobiographic elements, notably the near-fatal attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas in 1968. Examples from this series are held in notable public collection, including the Tate Collection in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
• 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.

 

 

ⁱ Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, New York, 1968, p. 1. 

ⁱⁱ Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 453.