"National Velvet" (1963) was one of the first paintings in which Warhol explicitly evoked cinema, by using a publicity still of the 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in her star-making role and silk-screening it repeatedly to suggest the succession of images in a film strip. We might also see the 10 1/2-foot-tall painting as paralleling compositionally the layout of a fan letter: It reads irresistibly from top left to bottom right.
Though the movie "National Velvet" (1944) was in color, Warhol used black on a silver ground to suggest the proverbial "silver screen," the fading of the moviegoer's memories and the star's inevitable eclipse by time. (Taylor was rumored to be dying of cancer in London when Warhol made the painting.) He symbolically fended off that eclipse by reiterating the same source image, and acknowledged it by letting the silkscreen clog and run dry as he reused it.
"National Velvet" shows why critics increasingly concur that Warhol did his best work in the early '60s: All his obsessions - with stardom, anesthetic repetition, sexual ambiguity and the incursion of low content into high art - stand exposed here and oddly poised.
Via Sfgate
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About this blog
The aim of this blog is to collect as many prints of Andy Warhol's artwork in high resolution as possible. This blog is constantly updated. I will try to cover all aspects of Warhol's art - paintings, photos, video etc.
Email me if you have any questions/suggestions etc.