When Warhol was questioned regarding the method of production by which he created his stunning silkscreen flowers, he answered "I don't know. Ask Elaine." Elaine Sturtevant created her own “Warhol Flowers” in 1964 utilizing Warhol’s original silkscreens. By re-creating works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Joseph Beuys, Sturtevant has created “work that has nothing to do with 'appropriation,' the refocusing of history, or the death of art, or the negative questioning of originality. Rather just the opposite. It involves the power and autonomy of originality and the focus and pervasiveness of art." (Elaine Sturtevant, Society for Contemporary Art (SCA) lecture, Art Institute Chicago, September 23, 2009).
The present lot, Study for Flowers, 1964-65 is an early study depicting four, crisp, yellow Warholian flowers floating up a black canvas of pointed, fresh, green blades of grass. Iconic and at once referential, Sturtevant says her “first Warhol was a flower, and Andy was aware of my work and gave me the silkscreens.” (D. Cameron, A Conversation, A Salon History of Appropriation with Leo Castelli and Elaine Sturtevant, Flash Art, 1988) Through her vast artistic journey into the replication of Pop Art processes Sturtevant has forged an impenetrable dialogue with the artistic masters of the 1960s. Curator Peter Eleey explains that “in order to achieve what she [Sturtevant] was interested in, she would essentially be giving up everything you were told as an artist that you needed to succeed—a recognizable style, et cetera…..She’s somebody who basically adopts style as a medium, and in order to do that she assumed the guise of the artists around her. This is an incredibly powerful and threatening thing to take on.” (Peter Eleey in “Sturtevant: Repeat Offender,” W Magazine, May 8, 2014).