Beschreibung:

Andy Warhol Flowers (Four Yellow) 1964 acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas image: 25.4 x 21.6 cm (10 x 8 1/2 in.) overall: 35.6 x 32.5 cm (14 x 12 8/10 in.) Signed 'Andy Warhol' lower right. This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Andy Warhol Authentication Board. This work is registered under the identification number A103.095.
Provenance Private Collection, France Catalogue Essay ‘There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. Should I have to portray a convict – or a criminal – I shall so bedeck him in flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and new one.’ (Jean Genet as quoted in M. Lobek ‘In Transitition: Warhol’s Flowers’ in Andy Warhol Flowers, New York: Ekyn Maclean, 2012, n.p.) Andy Warhol’s Flowers are an iconic series in oeuvre the pop artist. Flowers (Four Yellow), 1964 is a brilliant example of Warhol’s most remarkable themes: serialisation, beauty and creation of immortal icons. Placed on a black background, the four yellow flowers are swallowed up in the darkness. The conception of Flowers overlapped with Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a controversial mural of criminals’ photos that Warhol created for the 1964 World’s Fair. Warhol himself noticed the connection between flowers and felons: ‘Mr Golden (the printer) make in black + white line sort of / make like my 13 most wanted men’. (Frei and Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol.02A:293). Viewed under this light, the flowers seem to assume funerary connotations. However, Flowers represent also a rupture from the previous dark series and mark the beginning of a new, brighter era. It was Warhol’s friend, Henry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan Museum, who encouraged him to produce a fresh series of works. Geldzahler remembers saying to Warhol: 'Enough death and disaster, Andy, it's time again for life. ‘What do you mean’, [Andy] said. I serendipitously picked a magazine off the floor and flipped it to a two-page advertisement with a colour photograph of flowers.' (H. Geldzahler, Making it New: Essays, Interviews and Talks, New York, 1994, p. 39). The photograph, published in June 1964 issue of Modern Photography, was taken by the executive editor Patricia Caulfield. A collection of the Flowers paintings was exhibited at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in late 1964 and marked a career milestone for Warhol. The exhibition sold out within days and Flowers became his most celebrated series: they are an eternal reminder of Warhol’s artistry not only to define beauty but also to make a simple object a fantastic, ever-lasting icon. Read More Artist Bio Andy Warhol American • 1928 - 1987 A seminal figure in the Pop Art movement of the early 1960s, Andy Warhol's paintings and screenprints are iconic beyond the scope of Art History, having become universal signifiers of an age. An early career in commercial illustration led to Warhol's appropriation of imagery from American popular culture and insistent concern with the superficial wonder of permanent commodification that yielded a synthesis of word and image, of art and the everyday. Warhol's obsession with creating slick, seemingly mass-produced artworks led him towards the commercial technique of screenprinting, which allowed him to produce large editions of his painted subjects. The clean, mechanical surface and perfect registration of the screenprinting process afforded Warhol a revolutionary absence of authorship that was crucial to the Pop Art manifesto. View More Works