“Violence and death, American-style, have always provided a sinister undertow to Warhol’s art”
—Robert Rosenblum

Andy Warhol’s Gun, c. 1981-1982 offers a striking reflection on the themes of mortality, violence, and the pervasive commodification of death in American culture that structured the artist’s career for over two decades. The present work is part of a larger series created during a period of profound introspection and artistic renewal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Warhol was reflecting on his visual past and revisiting thematic benchmarks of his career through his Reversal and Retrospective works. Adding to the unsettling nature of Gun is Warhol’s use of a cheerful, high-key pink hue that clashes starkly with the work’s macabre subject matter, creating a jarring visual dissonance that forces viewers to confront the tension between surface beauty and the underlying specter of death. The Gun series, examples of which are housed in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as Tate, London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, continues Warhol’s exploration of mortality and the media, themes central to his oeuvre since the early 1960s. Privately held in the same collection since it was acquired in 1998 from the London gallery of legendary British dealer Anthony d'Offay, this exceptional painting is now being shown publicly for the first time.

 

The present work connects deeply with the preoccupations of Warhol’s earlier Death and Disaster series from 1962-1965, where he explored the impact of repeated, violent imagery on the public consciousness. Extending these themes, Gun is deeply personal, tied not only to the violence explored in Warhol’s contemporaneous Knives and Crosses series of the early 1980s but also to the haunting narratives of death and trauma present in his Electric Chair and Jackie paintings of the 1960s. This continuity underscores Warhol’s decades-long, complex engagement with mortality and the lasting impact of violence on both a societal and individual level.

“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 Warhol

The revolver depicted in Gun closely resembles the weapon used by former Factory frequenter Valerie Solanas during her June 1968 assassination attempt on Warhol, an event that left him with deep psychological (and physical) scars. In addition to months of recovery in the hospital, the injuries he sustained required him to wear a surgical vest to hold his organs in place—something he had to continue wearing for the rest of his life. This near-fatal encounter marked a turning point in Warhol's life and career, infusing his later works with an intensified awareness of the fragility of life. As Warhol told The New York Times in November of that year, “Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. I don’t know what anything is about.”ⁱ The trauma of the shooting reverberates over a decade later in Gun, reflecting Warhol’s deep-seated fear of death—a fear so intense that he delayed critical medical treatment, ultimately contributing to his death in 1987 from complications following a gallbladder surgery he postponed despite his doctor’s warnings and a prolonged monthlong illness.

 

Even before the attempt on his life, Warhol was fascinated by sensationalized tabloid headlines and reports of suicides, car accidents, plane crashes, assassinations, and executions. He drew abundant source material from newspaper clippings and police photo archives—images whose reproducibility was magnified through his mechanical silkscreen process. In 1963, when poet John Giorno asked what he was working on, Warhol responded with tongue-in-cheek brevity: "Death."ⁱⁱ He began to explore how repeated exposure to such images could desensitize viewers. “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” he remarked, “it doesn’t really have any effect.” This idea of commonplace catastrophe was central to Warhol's Death and Disaster series, where the serial presentation of death-related images mirrored the repetitive and numbing nature of media coverage. In Gun, Warhol revisits this method of repetition and detachment, but with a more personal twist, drawing directly from his own traumatic experience.

 

As in the Electric Chair portraits Warhol began in 1963, the gun in Gun is decontextualized and transformed into a free-floating signifier—both connected and disconnected, critical and complacent. In the Electric Chairs, the empty execution chair stands as a stark symbol of state-sanctioned death, its desolate setting amplifying the eerie void left by the unseen victim. Similarly, Gun isolates the weapon, detached from the act of violence itself, focusing solely on the object that holds the potential for death. By omitting the figure, Warhol shifts the focus to the instruments of violence, making the viewer acutely aware of the latent threat they embody and the dehumanizing impact of their existence. In Gun, the weapon and its various apparitions stand alone: “Silent and disturbing, they are devoid of the sacrificed body, each of them an active tomb or sarcophagus of modernity, exalting the triumph of death through a social instrument and technology.”ⁱⁱⁱ Likewise, as Warhol removes the human hand that pulls the trigger, he also removes the artist’s hand from the act of painting in favor of the mechanistic. This ambivalence is central to Warhol’s strategy of meaning-making, allowing the work to oscillate between detachment and engagement, superficiality and depth.

 

The dual triple imagery in Gun, with its overlapping silkscreens, captures the disorientation and fragmented memory that Warhol experienced after the shooting. “Guns are so quick,” he reflected.^iv “A person comes in with a gun, and there’s not time to think… it was so quick.”^v This collapsing of time is visually echoed in the layered depiction of the revolver, rendered in stark black and crimson red. The gun’s ghostly, X-ray-like appearance on the canvas conveys a chilling detachment, while the meticulous detail in its rendering underscores Warhol’s ability to transform a simple object into a profound symbol of personal and societal violence.

 

 “The Guns and Knives paintings from 1981-1982 are stark reminders of the violent society we lived in then and now”
—Vincent Fremont

 

Gun also functions as a critical commentary on the commodification of violence in American society. Warhol, who had long been interested in the intersection of consumerism and death, approached the revolver in Gun with the same detached aesthetic he applied to his earlier depictions of consumer goods, such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Dollar Signs. This approach underscores the notion that violence, like consumer products, had become a mass-produced, depersonalized commodity in American culture. The creation of Gun, as well as Warhol’s concurrent exploration of Knives, Crosses, and Dollar Signs between 1981-1982, reflects Warhol’s ambition to create symbols of contemporary society, conflating issues of money, power, and violence. This ambition is particularly poignant given the socio-political context of a decade marked by the rise of neo-conservatism and increasing global conflicts. 

 

The early 1980s were marked by significant violence and a heightened sense of insecurity in America. The assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in March 1981 shocked the nation, highlighting the persistent threat of political violence. This period also saw the murder of John Lennon in December 1980, which continued to resonate into the following years, symbolizing the vulnerability of even the most beloved public figures. Additionally, the rise in urban crime rates during this time contributed to a growing fear of violence, leading to increased public discourse on gun control and safety. The cultural climate was one of anxiety and reflection, with violence becoming a pervasive element of the American experience. The revolver depicted in Gun resonates not only as a reflection of these broader societal fears and tensions, but also as a personal symbol for Warhol, both in terms of his own trauma and the ideas that had catalyzed his work from the very beginning. By revisiting the theme of death and disaster, Warhol draws a direct line between the media-saturated violence of the 1960s and the personal and societal turmoil of the 1980s.

 

Despite the significance of these works, the Guns and Knives were omitted from Warhol’s January 1982 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, leaving only his Dollar Sign paintings on display. As his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone recalls,

 

That could have been a beautiful show. What happened was he had done these paintings of knives and guns at the same time [the gun he painted was the same .32 snub-nosed pistol that Valerie Solanas had shot him with], so I set up big butcher knives, dollar signs and maybe one gun. Then I set up four more dollar signs, two giant butcher knives, and another gun, so when you walked into the gallery it looked like you were being mugged. Richard Serra came in while I was setting it up and said, “God, this is brilliant.”^vi

 

The decision to tone down the exhibition, based on the advice of Warhol’s business manager, Fred Hughes, likely reflects the unsettling nature of the imagery and the harsh criticism Warhol faced from contemporary art critics.^vii However, the exclusion of these works did not diminish their impact; the original concept for the show was later exhibited in Madrid, opening at the Galeria Fernando Vijande in December 1982. The controversial presentation—Warhol’s first in post-Franco Spain—ended up selling out, and works such as Gun remain powerful testaments to Warhol’s ability to encapsulate the anxieties of his era.

 

 

 

ⁱ Andy Warhol, quoted in conversation with John Leonard, “The Return of Andy Warhol,” The New York Times, Nov. 10, 1968. 

ⁱⁱ Andy Warhol quoted in interview with John Giorno, 1963, in ed. Kenneth Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews 1962-1987, New York, 2004, p. 25.

ⁱⁱⁱ Germano Celant, Superwarhol, New York, 2003, p. 7.

^iv Andy Warhol, quoted in conversation with John Leonard, “The Return of Andy Warhol,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1968.

^v Ibid.

^vi Ronnie Cutrone, quoted in Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 327.

^vii Ibid.