In 1985, the American Pop artist Andy Warhol turned his attention to royalty and embarked on his largest portfolio of screenprints, entitled the Reigning Queens series. The series features the four female monarchs who reigned at the time, having assumed their thrones by birthright alone: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and Queen Ntfombi Tfwala of Swaziland. In depicting some of the world’s most recognisable female figures and appropriating their most widely circulated images, the series encapsulates Warhol’s fascination with fame, mass-media, and the extremes of social hierarchy. Based on official or media photographs of these monarchs, the screenprint portfolio consists of four colour variants of each queen, amounting to sixteen images in total. The screenprints were created using a photographic silkscreen technique central to Warhol’s practice, employed profusely in both his prints and paintings.
Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix reigned as Queen of the Netherlands from 1980 until she abdicated in favour of her eldest son, the current King Willem-Alexander, in 2013. Beatrix comes from a line of reigning queens, succeeding her mother, Queen Juliana (reigned 1948-1980), who in turn succeeded Queen Wilhelmina (reigned 1890-1948), Beatrix’s maternal grandmother. Warhol’s screenprint appropriates an official portrait of Queen Beatrix taken during the celebrations for her inauguration. Beatrix is pictured wearing Queen Emma’s Diamond Tiara, thought to be her favourite due to the frequency with which she selected it for royal engagements. The tiara itself is also a rich symbol of female power within the Dutch monarchy. Originally commissioned for Beatrix’s great-grandmother, it has passed down through the three subsequent generations of reigning queens. In addition to referencing this emblem of ruling women in the Dutch monarchy, Warhol also adds graphic shapes of flat colour to his portrait of Queen Beatrix – an intervention that became more frequent in the artist’s work from the mid-1970s. In this way, Warhol perfectly balances tradition with modernity, rendering Princess Beatrix as a monarch poised between the regalia of Dutch monarchical history and the consumer culture of the twentieth century.
