Andy Warhol
ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA,1928-New York, USA,1987).
"Robert Mapplethorpe," 1983.
Silkscreen on board of the Lenox Museum.
Unique piece.
VF initialed (Vincent Fremont), stamped Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, numbered UP41.77 and stamped Estate of Andy Warhol.
With label of the Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery.
Attached certificate from the Maruani Gallery.
Provenance: Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York Ikon/Kay Richards Gallery, Santa Monica.
Bibliography: Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints, A Catalog Raisonné 1962-1987, München-NY 1997, p.225, no. IIIA.26, two other examples illustrated in color.
Measurements: 102 x 102 cm; 130.5 x 128 cm (frame).
Unlike other celebrity silkscreen prints by Warhol, the portrait of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe responds to a close bond between the two artists, who shared environments and interests. To a certain extent, we can affirm that the iconic Pop Art figure influenced the young photographer. They met in the early seventies, and Mapplethorpe would also portray Warhol and the personalities that circulated around The Factory: artists, composers and models linked to the New York underground. Also, unlike the color-saturated silkscreen prints, Warhol opts here for shades of gray, as a nod to the black and white of Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs. This is a unique piece, not conceived with the idea of mechanical seriality, like other screen-printed pieces by the artist.
Remembered mainly for his controversial images, Mapplethorpe transcended the limits of photography both in his choice of subject matter and technique. His photographs of the 1970s and 1980s of male nudes and sexually explicit images brought him notoriety. Mapplethorpe was influenced by Warhol early in his career, and his move to Manhattan in 1969 was a further step in befriending Warhol and possibly even emulating his lifestyle. Even as Mapplethorpe became famous in the New York art scene in his own right, he still regarded Warhol as one of the most important living artists. Both artists shared a keen interest in portraiture, and while Warhol produced documents of celebrity and glamour, Mapplethorpe focused on the aesthetics of the body. They also shared a similar approach to creating artwork, with both artists being the creative force behind the camera and studio staff working on the production of the artwork. The friendship between the two developed a genuine intimacy and resulted in the production of reciprocal artworks and in 1983; Mapplethorpe created four portraits of Andy Warhol (an example of which is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London) and Warhol created a series of silkscreen prints of the photographer, which Mapplethorpe considered the ultimate symbol of his own success. The present work is part of this narrative that brings together the two pioneering American icons.
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, filmmaker and music producer who played a crucial role in the birth and development of pop art. Considered at the time a guru of modernity, Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year, already established in New York, he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases whose subject matter was based on some element or image from the everyday environment, advertising or comics. Soon he began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated from his works any expressionist trait until he reduced the work to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its maximum level of depersonalization in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as a working method, by means of which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor or Mao Tse-tung, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. This appropriationism, a constant in the works of the proponents of pop art, extended to works of art of a universal nature. By means of mass reproduction, he managed to strip the media fetishes he used of their usual referents and turn them into stereotyped icons with a merely decorative purpose. In 1963 he created the Factory, a workshop in which numerous figures from New York's underground culture gathered around him. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life eventually established a coherent line between his work and his life's trajectory. He is currently represented in the most important contemporary art museums in the world, such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Fukoka Museum in Japan, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the National Art Museum of the 21st century in Rome, the MUMOK in Vienna, the SMAK in Ghent and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the museums that bear his name in Pittsburgh and Medzilaborce (Slovakia).
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ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA,1928-New York, USA,1987).
"Robert Mapplethorpe," 1983.
Silkscreen on board of the Lenox Museum.
Unique piece.
VF initialed (Vincent Fremont), stamped Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, numbered UP41.77 and stamped Estate of Andy Warhol.
With label of the Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery.
Attached certificate from the Maruani Gallery.
Provenance: Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York Ikon/Kay Richards Gallery, Santa Monica.
Bibliography: Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints, A Catalog Raisonné 1962-1987, München-NY 1997, p.225, no. IIIA.26, two other examples illustrated in color.
Measurements: 102 x 102 cm; 130.5 x 128 cm (frame).
Unlike other celebrity silkscreen prints by Warhol, the portrait of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe responds to a close bond between the two artists, who shared environments and interests. To a certain extent, we can affirm that the iconic Pop Art figure influenced the young photographer. They met in the early seventies, and Mapplethorpe would also portray Warhol and the personalities that circulated around The Factory: artists, composers and models linked to the New York underground. Also, unlike the color-saturated silkscreen prints, Warhol opts here for shades of gray, as a nod to the black and white of Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs. This is a unique piece, not conceived with the idea of mechanical seriality, like other screen-printed pieces by the artist.
Remembered mainly for his controversial images, Mapplethorpe transcended the limits of photography both in his choice of subject matter and technique. His photographs of the 1970s and 1980s of male nudes and sexually explicit images brought him notoriety. Mapplethorpe was influenced by Warhol early in his career, and his move to Manhattan in 1969 was a further step in befriending Warhol and possibly even emulating his lifestyle. Even as Mapplethorpe became famous in the New York art scene in his own right, he still regarded Warhol as one of the most important living artists. Both artists shared a keen interest in portraiture, and while Warhol produced documents of celebrity and glamour, Mapplethorpe focused on the aesthetics of the body. They also shared a similar approach to creating artwork, with both artists being the creative force behind the camera and studio staff working on the production of the artwork. The friendship between the two developed a genuine intimacy and resulted in the production of reciprocal artworks and in 1983; Mapplethorpe created four portraits of Andy Warhol (an example of which is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London) and Warhol created a series of silkscreen prints of the photographer, which Mapplethorpe considered the ultimate symbol of his own success. The present work is part of this narrative that brings together the two pioneering American icons.
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, filmmaker and music producer who played a crucial role in the birth and development of pop art. Considered at the time a guru of modernity, Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year, already established in New York, he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases whose subject matter was based on some element or image from the everyday environment, advertising or comics. Soon he began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated from his works any expressionist trait until he reduced the work to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its maximum level of depersonalization in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as a working method, by means of which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor or Mao Tse-tung, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. This appropriationism, a constant in the works of the proponents of pop art, extended to works of art of a universal nature. By means of mass reproduction, he managed to strip the media fetishes he used of their usual referents and turn them into stereotyped icons with a merely decorative purpose. In 1963 he created the Factory, a workshop in which numerous figures from New York's underground culture gathered around him. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life eventually established a coherent line between his work and his life's trajectory. He is currently represented in the most important contemporary art museums in the world, such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Fukoka Museum in Japan, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the National Art Museum of the 21st century in Rome, the MUMOK in Vienna, the SMAK in Ghent and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the museums that bear his name in Pittsburgh and Medzilaborce (Slovakia).
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