Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, May 15, 2014 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 15 May 2014 7PM

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Minneapolis, Locksley Shea Gallery, Andy Warhol-New Drawings, September 17 - October 17, 1975
    Stuttgart, Württembergische Kunstverein, Andy Warhol: Das Zeichnerische Werk 1942-1975, February 12 - March 28, 1976; then traveled to Dusseldorf, Stadtische Kusnthalle; Bremen, Kunsthalle; Munich, Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; Berlin, Haus am Waldsee; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts; Lucerne, Kunstmuseum
    New York, Grant-Selwyn Fine Art, April 2001
    Florida, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, With You I Want to Live: The Gordon Locksley and Dr. George T. Shea Collection, March 23, 2009 - March 22, 2010
    Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Extended Loan, April 2 - October 27, 2013

  • Literature

    Art Magazine, November 1975, pp. 86 – 87 (illustrated)
    R. Crone, Andy Warhol: Das Zeichnereische Werk 1942-1975, exh. cat., Württembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart, no. 217-224
    Fort Lauderdale, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, With You I Want to Live: The Gordon Locksley and Dr. George T. Shea Collection, exh. cat., Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 2009, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Andy Warhol’s Flowers paintings have pervaded our global consciousness as the totemic standard of classic American Pop; their imagery acting as a metaphor for a generation that changed not only artistic, but also social and political, topographies in a supremely transformative decade. Flowers #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, were executed nearly a decade later in 1975 after the heady Factory days of the 1960s. For Warhol this symbol of fragile and transient beauty was a consistent subject both before and after his seminal series of paintings. Executed at a time when much of his output was commissioned society portraits, the current work is a return to a direct engagement with artmaking via this most intimate medium of drawing. Eschewing the silkscreen, Warhol similarly was revisiting his early career as a commercial artist and draftsman illustrating printed advertisements. Beginning with a fully understood realization of a flower resting inside a chalice, the drawings progressively become further and further cropped, highlighting the blossom as the central element as well as Warhol’s deft line. Replicating a zoom lens and drawing from photographs, Warhol brings the viewer to within inches of the flower just as one might lean in to smell its sweet perfume. Each panel gradually evolves from the still-life in the first panel; by the eighth panel the work has nearly lost its own sense of reality becoming a tangled abstraction. Interestingly, the Flowers paintings are similarly twisted by Warhol’s adroit cropping and rearrangement and it is clear here that the two are closely related. His play on the traditional genre of the Still Life painting can be seen as a contemporary reworking of an age-old motif, following the great art historical traditions of Dutch masters and nineteenth century painters, whilst promoting a completely modern aesthetic. Constantly reinventing and challenging himself, Warhol has clearly reexamined his earlier motif and by hand, reconstructed and reframed it as only he could, creating an art work equally indicative of the time, and himself, as any of his other masterpieces.

  • 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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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LOCKSLEY SHEA GALLERY

43

Andy Warhol

Flowers 1-8

1975
graphite on paper, in 8 parts
40 3/4 x 27 1/4 in. (103.5 x 69.2 cm.)
Each signed and dated "Andy Warhol 1975" on the reverse.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $389,000

Contact Specialist
Zach Miner
Head of Sale
zminer@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1256

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 15 May 2014 7PM