Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London

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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

    After having reinvented himself in the 1970s as the leading portraitist of his generation, the 1980s brought about yet another period of change and reinvention in Warhol's work as the artist set to embark on a variety of different projects. Following in the footsteps of proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico whom he greatly admired, Warhol revisited his earlier body of works, producing revised versions of his most formidable Pop paintings for the latest Reversal/Retrospectives series. Beyond that, Warhol also found renewed relevance and artistic rejuvenation in the form of collaborations with emerging artists during that period such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Perhaps due to the influence of their artistic styles of hand drawn lines and child-like scribbles, the most significant of his late accomplishments was his return to hand painting coinciding with an ever increasingly religious thematic thrust to his work, an epic combination of developments that resulted in the monumental Last Supper series of paintings. This was Warhol's final major body of work, one possessed of an uncanny gravitas in the wake of the artist’s early death in 1987.
     
    Best remembered for his iconic multiples of pop culture figures and advertising imagery, and as ringleader of the celebrity hotspot The Factory, little known even to his inner circle of friends, Warhol attended mass regularly at Church of the Heavenly Rest on 5th Avenue and 90th Street in New York. The artist frequently volunteered to distribute food to the homeless and destitute, and even received Pope John Paul II’s personal blessing on April 1st, 1980 during a trip to the Vatican City in Rome. By the mid 1980sWarhol's work began to include religious iconography, bringing it together with and juxtaposing it against an already established language of profane emblems and capitalist logos, most notably in the works from his late black-and-white series of silkscreen prints. However, it was in the Last Supper series, commissioned by the well established Warhol patron Alexander Iolas to be installed across the street from Leonardo DaVinci's famous Last Supper fresco in Milan, that Warhol's heretofore private religious preoccupation would manifest itself most spectacularly in his art work.
     
    The Last Supper/Be a Somebody With a Body 1986, is a part of the Last Supper series in which Warhol traced onto a canvas the projection of a detail from a simple schematic outline drawing of DaVinci’s painting found in an artist’s manual, a technique he picked up from his collaboration with Basquiat in the early 1980s. Here the traced outlined of the Christ figure sits atop the heroic bust of action hero Sylvester Stallone, firmly juxtaposing his understanding of the power of a visual cliché and his reverence for the mechanisms of American popular culture and media, in true Warhol fashion.
     
    The juxtaposition of capitalist logos and profane imagery is further exacerbated by the utilization of famous people celebrity portraits and the sacredness of religious imagery and iconography.
     
    In the present lot, the two male figures seem to be facing and looking towards each other with reverence and respect, Warhol cleverly depicts two figurative icons from completely different contexts and visually presented them in the same artistic treatment and manner. One works in the Hollywood movie industry, and the other is a father figure from the Church/Bible: both are untouchables, belonging to a stratosphere so high no layman can reach him. Yet they are accessible to people in contrasting ways, one reaches out to people’s imagination in the cinema theatre, the other touches the inner heart and soul of the human body.
     
    The text in the work Be a Somebody with a Body brings to mind the idea of the human body, a physical living breathing machine, subject to sickness, pain, life, birth and death. Action superstar Sylvester Stallone is famous for his strong physique, a man of great strength and endurance to overcome any physical challenge. Smiling slightly with a confident pose, the silhouette of Stallone’s strong bare shoulders and hard bulging muscles represents the ultimate symbol of masculinity and bravery; to have a beautifully sculpted body is to be desired and rewarded success in modern society. On the other hand, the looming outline of Christ clothed in a gown, eyes cast down with the face of a kind and humble person, is the very symbol and definition of all life and creation. In the bible, the body of Christ gives birth to Eve; the body is the house where the Holy Spirit resides. Yet the body is also the ultimate object of desire and lust, this work places sexuality and creed in a perilously
    close juxtaposition posing the difficult questions of homosexuality and religion and what it is to desire an image of Christ. This is an all together challenging art work that forces difficult questions on its audience without apology.
     
    Warhol was now presented with the most perfect opportunity for him to collide two of his greatest obsessions, his personal piety and the secular power of images reproduced and disseminated into the varied channels of
    the current visual culture: "Looking both ways, at the highest sacred art and at the lowest commercial design, and fusing them in this hallmark fashion, these late pictures seem to suggest that, for a Pop god, the meek and poor
    in spirit among artists are no less important than Raphael or Leonardo… The significance of Warhol's late black-and-white works based on advertising images and lettering is perhaps most apparent in these mural scale
    hybrids of the sacred and profane: the black-and-white images are Warhol's final subversive lexicon of street art images awaiting transposition into art gallery and museum contexts where they will expand post-Pop
    postmodern taste," (C. Stuckey, Andy Warhol: Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away! Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984-1986, New York 1992, pp. 28-31).

  • 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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334

Andy Warhol

Detail of the Last Supper / Be Somebody with a Body

1985-1986
Acrylic on canvas.
126.4 x 153 cm. (49 3/4 x 60 1/4 in).
Stamped with the Estate of Andy Warhol and numbered “PA10.300” and with the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts seal on the overlap.

Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London