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Amanda Lo Iacono
\nGlobal Managing Director and Specialist, Head of Evening Sale, New York
\n+1 212 940 1278
\nALoiacono@phillips.com
\n
\nCarolyn Mayer
\nAssociate Specialist, Associate Head of Evening Sale, New York
\n+1 212 940 1206
\nCMayer@phillips.com

\n\n

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Andy Warhol, Nosepicker I: Why Pick on Me (The Broad Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose), 1948. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, New York.

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As part of our November Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Phillips will offer two early paintings by Andy Warhol: Nosepicker I: Why Pick on Me (The Broad Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose) and Living Room, both created during the artist’s last years at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). Executed in 1948 and indicative of the genius that was to come, these incredible relics of one of the 20th century’s greatest visionaries have remained in the artist’s family for over seventy years, until now. An additional aspect to the history of these works is the fact that they were thought to have been lost at one point in the late 1970s. The paintings were in the Warhola family car when it was stolen. Fortunately for the family and for art enthusiasts across the globe, the car was recovered, with the artworks completely unscathed. Prior to the sale in New York on 15 November, they will travel to Southampton, Los Angeles, London, and Paris.

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As a 20-year-old art student at the end of 1948, Andy Warhol created his first self-portrait painting, and what many consider to be his first masterwork. Nosepicker I crudely renders the artist then still known as Andrew Warhola — immediately identifiable by his distinctive blonde hair and bulbous red nose — with a finger jammed up his nostril in a gesture that is at once repulsive and absorbing, playful and intimate. A rare example of a painting by Warhol’s hand, it perhaps evokes the expressive rawness of Jean Dubuffet more than the silkscreened aesthetic of his later persona. However, Nosepicker I’s interrogation of reproduction, self-image, and so-called “good” taste epitomize the Warholian themes that already underpinned his revolutionary approach.

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During his senior year at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Warhol was introduced to Ben Shahn and Paul Klee, unique and liberated pictorial language painters. These 20th century masters soon became two of Warhol’s most enduring influences. He began executing humor-inflected paintings and drawings that traced his development of a new technique: “blotted-line” transferring. This idiosyncratic process, a version of monotype printing, became Warhol’s first aesthetic trademark and originally stemmed from financial necessity. The youngest child of a working-class immigrant family in Pittsburgh, the artist was obliged to work with the least expensive drawing paper, which caused the ink to run and smear unpredictably. But where others saw difficulty, Warhol saw opportunity.

\n\n

As an early iteration of this new technique, Nosepicker I is one of Warhol’s first works in which the act of reproduction figures as an element of the medium itself. The blotted lines that outline the subject and adorn the decorative background presaged a career later preoccupied with a form of more mechanical repetition: silkscreen printing. This postmodern interrogation of the multiple would also manifest itself in Warhol’s propensity to return to his own image time and time again in an iconic body of self-portraits. Beginning with Nosepicker I and spanning almost four decades, these works traced his evolution from Andrew Warhola to rising ‘60s art world star, and then to one of the greatest figures of the 20th century.

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Soon after completing the work, he sent his daring submission to the 39th Annual Exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in January 1949, where it was refused inclusion on the grounds of its supposedly “offensive” subject matter. Undeterred and remaining confident in his first masterwork, Warhol resubmitted it to an exclusive summer group exhibition at the Arts and Crafts Center a few months later. The painting’s audacious irreverence and formal inventiveness attracted much local attention and success. This story of Nosepicker I’s reception is a fitting metaphor for Warhol’s career, which saw him indefatigably pushing up against the walls of what was possible during his time.

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Andy Warhol, Living Room, 1948. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, New York.

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Featured alongside Nosepicker I is another early work from the same year that offers the view a peek into Warhol’s early life and perspective of a youth growing up with his Carpatho-Rusyn emigrant parents and siblings in a small two-bedroom house at 3252 Dawson Street in Pittsburgh. Expertly manipulating the textural versatility of the medium to articulate varying shades of red, Living Room depicts the worn and beloved heart of the Warhola residence, adorned with the family’s shabby maroon sofa and armchair, wooden rocking chair, and brick fireplace that his father built. Like Nosepicker I, it has remained in the Warhola family until now, a rare painted example of the 20th century master’s hand, executed before he transitioned to his silkscreen technique and machine aesthetic.

\n\n

A major in “pictorial design,” one exercise given to Warhol called for the students to visualize a living room for an imaginary Oakland family and elucidate in a supplemental written component how the depicted belongings denoted the unseen characters’ status and traits. Having lived in the working class neighborhood for almost 15 years, the artist cleverly bent the rules and covertly rendered the Warhola residence for a multigenerational household of six. The family he envisioned bore a thinly-veiled resemblance to his own. In a sense, Warhol handed himself a more difficult task than was assigned: to understand not only what his family home and belongings said about himself, but also what they might say about their other owners in a parallel universe. The work thus reveals as much about Warhol’s life and childhood as it does that of its hypothetical inhabitants. It is not only an account of his formative years, but a harbinger of what was to come.

\n\n

Highlighted in countless museum exhibitions, such as the recent retrospective Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Living Room is a seminal example of Warhol’s signature negotiation of illusion and reality. The false narrative he playfully constructed for a place of deep personal significance to him presages his later unraveling of the glittering face of celebrity and stardom and the turbulent truth that lay behind it. One of the central tenets of his revolutionary approach, which was just becoming visible in Living Room, it was this same interrogation of identity that bridged Andy Warhol the icon and Andrew Warhola the person.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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The Rothko Effect: Why Does Art Move Us? >

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New Now's Artists to Watch >

\n","publishDate","2022-10-04T18:05:47.000000Z","authorCredit","Arian Murati","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/105197000/an-early-glimpse-at-two-rare-early-andy-warhol-paintings","displayOrder",2,"auctionEditorialID",1667,"editorialID",3978,"flocklerID",105197000,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/twombleytca-e0d740ea-78e2-4e67-844c-35c86471dd0a_s600x0.png","Our 15 November Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art in New York will be led by Cy Twombly’s monumental 'Untitled' from 2005.","Cy Twombly's Monumental 'Bacchus' Painting Comes to Phillips New York","

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2005. Estimate: $35,000,000 – 45,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.

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With exceptional provenance and estimated at $35-45 million, Untitled is a masterpiece from one of Cy Twombly’s last epic series that found its inception in his blackboards and crystallized in the three discrete suites of paintings collectively known as the Bacchus series. The Bacchus paintings began in 2003 amidst the US invasion of Iraq and culminated in 2008 when the artist donated three of the monumental works to the Tate Modern, London. The present work is the second-largest canvas from the 2005 series which were exhibited under the collective title Bacchus Psilax Mainomenos. Recalling the artist’s earlier Blackboard paintings from the late 1960s with its continuous looping forms, the Bacchus series revisits this earlier motif with a renewed vigor and energy which manifests on the surface of Untitled.

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“With the top ten auction prices for works by Cy Twombly having all been set in the past eight years, it’s clear that the market is stronger than ever," says Jean-Paul Engelen, President, Americas, and Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art. "At sixteen feet wide, Untitled is among the largest of Twombly’s works to ever appear at auction, with its subject referring to the dual nature of the ancient Greek and Roman god of wine, intoxication, and debauchery. The work hails from the series that marked Twombly’s ultimate artistic expression at the summit of his career and we are proud to offer this masterpiece as the highlight of our Fall season.”

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The translation of Bacchus Psilax Mainomenos references both the exuberance and rage that alcohol can bring, with Tate Director Nicholas Serota remarking about the paintings, “They relate obviously to the god of wine and to abandon, and luxuriance, and freedom.” The work also recalls one of the most violent and emotionally stirring moments of Iliad, when the Greek hero, Achilles, kills the Trojan prince, Hector, dragging his corpse in circles through the desert around the walled city of Troy—just as Twombly’s red line colors the ground of Untitled.

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The repetition of the mythical theme in Twombly’s work, particularly the continued invocation of Bacchus across the years, finds its stylistic parallel in Twombly’s signature, circular, scrawling gesture. Two extremes rise and fall within one ancient deity, cycling, one over the other, just as Twombly’s brush turns across the surface of Untitled. This gesture appeared in the artist’s earlier Blackboard series of the 1960s, making a reprise in Untitled, though with a much wilder red spiral. The red line of Untitled is rich with emotive movement as the spiral turns and drips across the canvas, the result of Twombly likely using his whole body, swinging the brush, which he attached to a long pole, across the canvas.

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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A Glimpse at Two Rare, Early Andy Warhol Paintings >

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Meet the Specialists of Phillips Los Angeles >

\n\n

\n","2022-10-27T15:59:57.000000Z","Phillip Crook","https://www.phillips.com/article/107231782/cy-twombly-bacchus-series-phillips-auction",1668,4001,107231782,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/screen-shot-2022-10-26-at-9-06-06-am-1dd50c86-1300-4944-bfc6-cdce8522772a_s600x0.png","Five sought-after artists coming to our 15-16 November New York auctions.","Artists to Watch: New York","

Danica Lundy, Miss Fist Kiss, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.

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Danica Lundy

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Canadian artist Danica Lundy’s work draws on a long, painterly interest in the human body and perspective in art history, which she uniquely interprets with disorienting, complex canvases. Lundy cites Italian Renaissance masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Battista Alberti as an early reference point, first learning to draw figures by copying Renaissance sculptures from a book. Yet unlike her Renaissance inspirations, who sought order and harmony in their compositions, Lundy’s paintings lean into the chaos of bodily existence. Seen here, the claustrophobic composition of Miss Fist Kiss depicts bodies with transparencies and overlapping limbs, obscuring where one body ends and another begins. “We live in bodies we can’t usually see into, so why shouldn’t painting be a forum for that imaginary observation?” the artist asks. Lundy completed her BFA at Mount Allison University, Sackville, and her MFA at the New York Academy of Art. Her recently exhibited works include solo shows in the United States, Canada, and Europe, as well as a summer 2022 solo exhibition "Stop Bath" at White Cube in London, where she is represented.

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Devan Shimoyama, Anthony, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Devan Shimoyama

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Highlighted in a solo museum exhibition “Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby” at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2018, Devan Shimoyama often incorporates three-dimensional materials such as jewelry, flowers, or feathers into his distinctively layered portraits — a practice the artist relates to "the same process a drag queen may use to get ready for a gig. I’m essentially creating a glamorous, sparkling, magical, fictitious version of myself and others... I’m always striving to create my own origin mythology or folklore of the queer Black male.” Shimoyama's collaged portraiture deals largely with themes of societal transformation, referencing both personal narratives and wider cultural touchstones, like classical mythology, tarot cards, films, and pop music icons. Born in Philadelphia, Shimoyama studied drawing and painting at Penn State, followed by an MFA from Yale. His work has been featured at Kavi Gupta Gallery, De Buck Gallery, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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Ilana Savdie, Marimonda Desplegada, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.

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Ilana Savdie

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For Ilana Savdie, painting is form of protest — themes of power and play inform both the content and the process of creating her work. Savdie’s Marimonda Desplegada fuses the folkloric and the grotesque in a composition inspired by the artist’s upbringing in Barranquilla, the Colombian city that hosts the world’s second-largest carnaval. The painting prominently features several fluorescent marimonda, Columbian jester costumes dating to the 1800s, which mock the elite with their primate-cum-elephant forms. But her works are also festive and hopeful, containing a celebration that pushes against societal boundaries. Moving to Brooklyn, the artist noticed parallels between carnaval and queer spaces in Bushwick. “We can locate in [the marimonda] a very queer history of exaggerating the body, and taking up space beyond imposed and oppressive boundaries as forms of resistance and protest,” Savdie says. “I’m always going to be bigger than the space allotted for me, and embracing that is liberating.” Savdie received a BFA from the Rode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale. Recent exhibitions include "In Jest" at White Cube in London and "Entrañadas" at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Left: Lucy Bull, Untitled, 2019. Right: Lucy Bull, Untitled (Green), 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Lucy Bull

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After a breakout solo show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles last year, Lucy Bull is making a name for herself as one of the most exciting young abstract painters. Bull’s tessellating compositions are both surreal and psychedelic, prompting a visceral experience. “I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances," she says. "I paint representational pictures of emotional situations... The paintings kind of function like Rorschachs. If someone were to tell me they see a certain thing in them, it's telling me more about their psychology than about the work itself.” Bull’s work has recently produced stunning auction results, including at Phillips Hong Kong where the work exceeded more than seven times its high estimate. In addition to two solo shows in just as many years at David Kordansky, Bull has been the subject of solo exhibitions at High Art, Human Resources, and Smart Objects. She recently exhibited in "Women of Now" at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, featured alongside Lauren Quin, Anna Weyant and Issy Wood.

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Alannah Farrell, The Dream (Lucky), 2021. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Alannah Farrell

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Making their auction debut this season, trans-identifying artist Alannah Farrell spotlights subjects from their local queer community — whether strangers or friends — through powerfully intimate portraits that bring the experiences of each sitter to the surface. “I make paintings that celebrate the brilliant misfits, the survivors, the hustlers, the entrepreneurs, the advocates, the ones thinking and speaking outside the status quo," Farrell says. "My work underlines the perseverance of the community and individual spirit." Now based in Manhattan, Farrell grew up surrounded by a family of painters in Upstate New York. The artist studied at The Cooper Union and is represented by Harper’s Gallery in New York and Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles. Farrell most recently exhibited in a solo show "I Want to Thank You" at Harper's, as well as in previous shows at The Painting Center, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, and Prior Art Space.

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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A Glimpse at Two Rare, Early Andy Warhol Paintings >

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Meet the Specialists of Phillips Los Angeles >

\n\n

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"I’m trying to look forward from my own vantage point, because that seems like the most challenging and complex thing to do."
\n—Avery Singer

\n\n

Untitled, 2015, quasi-satirically engages themes of digitization, projection, and reproduction as an avatar-portrait of Avery Singer’s autobiographical artist archetype. The work, which featured in the artist’s first European solo show at The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2016, originates from the pivotal body of work that launched the artist’s career, exploring the concept of the self as an archetypical artist through depictions of blocky, computer-generated characters.

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Untitled features a human bust in Singer’s signature greyscale; its flat hair, folded like confetti paper, casts shadows on the face in lieu of eyes or mouth. A detail is drawn out in a magnification loupe from the right cheek, seeking an invisible blemish in a gesture that any frequent user of social media will be all too familiar with. The hyper-zoom reveals textures unseen: a perforated dermis, microscopic particles that cast long shadows, like fingers, reaching out to touch the viewer and confront them with the work’s un/reality.

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\"lbert — Albert Oehlen, *Untitled,* 2004, Private Collection. Artwork: © Albert Oehlen / 2022 Artists Rights Society, New York

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Singer’s use of black and white in this body of work stems from a combination of childhood experiences and rekindled inspiration. The daughter of two film projectionists (her father worked at the Museum of Modern Art), Singer spent her childhood weekends watching art films in black and white in the museum’s basement viewing room. However, it took until 2009, when Singer, as an art student, saw an exhibition of Albert Oehlen’s Computer Paintings at Skarstedt, New York, for the artist to connect film and technology to her painting practice. “I had not been interested in contemporary painting until I saw that show,” she recalled. “And I realized, oh, this medium is actually really powerful, if you use it right.”ⁱ

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"If you’re going to make an original statement in painting, you also have to address its history… All artists, but especially painters, have to deal with the issue of art in the age of mechanical reproduction."
\n—Avery SingerSinger’s works from this period, Untitled included, ask, what is the role of art (or artist?) when images can be mass-produced by computers? Reflecting on the start of her career, Singer notes, “I had not seen paintings that employ 3-D modeling software as a means for image production, so I began to experiment with that.”ⁱⁱ She uses such software—the architectural mock-up tool called SketchUp was an early favorite—to build her blocky, greyscale compositions of mute, female-coded figures who “romantically inhabit” the “mystical corners” of early 20^th century art history.ⁱⁱⁱ The figures’ abject blankness satirizes nostalgia for an art world gone by, and her clunky computer renderings recall canonical art-historical tropes, such as the flowing hair of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, 1485-1486, Uffizi Gallery, or the corkscrew curls of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century sculptures. More contemporary references abound, too, as Singer draws from Modernist portraiture conventions, and classic theoretical concepts of image and reproduction.

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\"[left] — [left] Pablo Picasso, *Portrait of Dora Maar,* 1937. Musée Picasso, Paris. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
\n[right] Andy Warhol, *Birth of Venus (After Botticelli)*, 1984. Artwork: © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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"Instead of treating computer graphics as a flattening tool, I thought of using them as an illusory one, as a potential way to generate an unfamiliar reality."
\n—Avery Singer

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When building compositions like Untitled, Singer works backwards from Internet image sources, which she then runs through her digital modeling tools, and finally translates into acrylic on canvas.^iv In a way, her process is the inverse of the average person’s experience of using the Internet, where one’s online persona is built up, over time, from “real life” sources. For Singer, the “real life” thing, the physical painting, is the last object to come into being.

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Untitled exists in a digitally-mediated space in which one can zoom into the surface of the skin, yet the basic features of the face remain stubbornly undefined. The contrast of micro-knowledge and macro-frustration in Untitled perhaps reflects the “process of banalization” that Singer cites as a product of modern society, specifically, in terms of hyper-monetized and hyper-online spaces, such as social media, which is the natural habitat of the 21^st century artist building their career.^v

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Singer engages this digital landscape in both personal and universalized terms with Untitled. Her computer aesthetic creates the artistic space to explore the self as archetypical artist, both intimately tied to, and completely divorced from, the self as an individualized human being.

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ⁱ Avery Singer, quoted in Jason Rosenfeld, “Avery Singer with Jason Rosenfeld,” The Brooklyn Rail, September 2021, online.
\nⁱⁱ Avery Singer, quoted in Lauren Cornell, “Hyperreal, if You Like,” Flash Art, October 12, 2015, online.
\nⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
\n^iv “Hammer Projects: Avery Singer,” The Hammer Museum, October 2015, online.
\n^v Avery Singer, quoted in Cornell.

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4

Avery Singer

Untitled

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

Avery Singer