“I was disappointed that nobody in Dallas wears cowboy hats anymore.
The cowboy look is dead, I guess.”
—Andy Warhol One of Andy Warhol’s last major series, Cowboys and Indians is a magnificent suite of prints that showcases the artist’s amorous relationship with Americana. Continuing his fascination with cult image and celebrity, in the later stages of his career Warhol shifted his perspective to focus increasingly on legacy and the way in which people and culture are remembered. Cowboys and Indians leans into the Hollywood cliché popularised by Western films that uphold the mythology of the “heroic” west and the hero-villain narrative. Stylised in Warhol’s signature screenprint spirit, the bright colours adhere to the artist’s Pop aesthetic and the plain background removes context, presenting the characterised figures in an ahistorical setting reminiscent of a billboard advertisement. Ever the social commentator, here Warhol engages with America’s relationship to its own colonial history. His depictions teeter on the edge of fetishising Indigenous culture, their identity and history – though deeply admired – existing predominantly in the hyperbolic imaginary of the nation’s psyche like a Hollywood blockbuster.

“Bright Eyes” Postcard, manufactured by E.C. Kropp Co., Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Warhol had a profound fascination with Native American culture, his house filled with Navajo blankets, jewellery, masks and photographs of indigenous tribes by renowned American photographer Edward S. Curtis. Equally amorous of Western movies – having directed two himself that were so violent he was placed under FBI surveillance for a year – Warhol’s series explores the “good guy-bad guy” dichotomy shaped by colonial precedents. Amongst the people depicted in the series was John Wayne, a star of Western movies whose inclusion draws attention to the tendency to romanticise the “Wild West” in popular culture. Moreover, Warhol depicts the Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, an American legendary figure who marched federal troops into battle against a bank of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, stripped of his glorified accolades and portrayed in gaudy colour, undermining his celebrity.

Mother and Child takes as its reference image a detail from a postcard published by Milwaukee's E.C. Kropp Company. The mid-late nineteenth century saw the development of advanced mechanised collotype printing and an expanding market for pictorial ephemera. Amongst popularly disseminated images such as recognisible landscapes were souvenir-style collectables that depicted Native American peoples and artefacts. The mother and child depicted are therefore reduced to an exoticised stereotype; they have no control over the circulation of their identity, passed around in the hands of white Americans. Warhol’s depiction, however, crops the postcard format and focuses on their faces, the vibrant nature of the imagery affording them the status of his other Pop icons. Mother and Child also seems also to reference religious imagery of the Madonna and Child, bringing a greater sense of reverence and art historical depth to his subjects as opposed to the original postcard depiction.

Upon its publication, a complete set of Cowboys and Indians was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, an institute Warhol frequented for inspiration and leisure. The gesture was the first step in the process of rectifying discordant historical tension and draws attention to the pitfalls of American exceptionalism through the romanticisation of Native American history and identity, a deeply damaging racial epithet created and sustained through Western perception.
- Provenance
  The Taylor Gallery, Belfast
  Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006
- Literature
  see Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann 383
- 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 a Private Collection, Northern Ireland

116

Andy Warhol

Mother and Child, from Cowboys and Indians (see F. & S. 383)

1986
Unique screenprint in colours, on Lenox Museum Board, the full sheet.
S. 91.6 x 91.5 cm (36 1/8 x 36 in.)
Signed and numbered 'TP 16/36' in pencil (a unique colour variant trial proof, the edition was 250 and 50 artist's proofs), published by Gaultney, Klineman Art, Inc., New York, framed.

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£25,000 - 35,000

Sold for £63,500

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