Andy Warhol - Photographs London Thursday, November 5, 2015 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Holly Solomon, New York
    Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
    Christie's, New York, 26 April 2005, lot 58
    Private Collection
    Christie's, New York, First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art, 10 September 2007, lot 234

  • Literature

    Andy Warhol Photobooth Pictures, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1989, pp. 15, 20, 26, 28
    Andy Warhol Photography, Edition Stemmle, 1999, pp. 94, 96-99, for variants
    C. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Abrams, 2006, p. 189, for a variant

  • Catalogue Essay

    I asked Andy to do my portrait. We went to Broadway and 47th Street, where they had this photobooth. Andy met me there, and we had a bunch of quarters. He was very particular about which booth. We tried a whole bunch of them... It was very curious because he didn't like this booth and he did like that booth, and he maybe wanted this one, so we spent about an hour going from booth to booth. We finally decided on a booth. Andy took a few pictures, he stood there with me for a little bit and then he left me on my own. So I did the pictures all by myself. It helped being private and he understood that, too...

    Actually, if you're in a photobooth for a long time it gets pretty boring... I got so bored that I started to really act in them. I was a student then of Lee Strasberg, so I started to do all these acting exercises... Fifty dollars is a lot in a photobooth!... Andy was really a great portrait painter and he must have really liked me a lot. He made me into the archetype of the sexually liberated woman of our time...

    It [the portrait] really is an icon of this liberated woman, who is trying very hard to be liberated. In the 60s there were rules, if you were an intelligent woman, you were an upset woman... You had to be thin...We were on amphetamines. I was taking Seconals to go to sleep, I weighed 87 pounds...

    Andy and I used to talk about art together, and we talked about acting. Andy – I must tell you – has been maligned terribly. He was very generous to people, because what he tried to do was to give people what he thought they wanted...

    Holly Solomon

  • 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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30

Holly Solomon

1963-1964
Six unique gelatin silver photobooth prints.
Each 19.7 x 4 cm (7 3/4 x 1 5/8 in.)
Overall 19.7 x 26.4 cm (7 3/4 x 10 3/8 in.)

Each initialled 'T.J.H.' by Timothy J. Hunt of the Andy Warhol Foundation in pencil and 'Estate of Andy Warhol', 'Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts' stamps on the verso.

Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 

Sold for £15,000

Contact Specialist
Lou Proud
Head of Photographs
London
+ 44 207 318 4018

Photographs

London Auction 6 November 2015 2pm