Working with his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone on the Oxidations, Warhol experimented with the catalytic reaction of urine and metallic paints to create brilliant golds and acidic greens that radiate across richly textured surfaces. By urinating on the canvas, he succeeded in creating the “physical presence” to which he aspired in painting and simultaneously parodied the act of painting. The Oxidations were the first abstractions that Warhol produced and reveal his fascination with and envy of the Abstract Expressionist painters, who had dominated the New York art scene during Warhol’s early career in the 1950s with their active and gestural approach to painting.
Showing posts with label Andy Warhol artworks in high resolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andy Warhol artworks in high resolution. Show all posts
'Oxidation Painting (in 12 parts)' by Andy Warhol (1978) in high resolution
'Telephone' by Andy Warhol (1962) in high resolution
In 1962, Andy Warhol abandoned his commercial illustration work and made Telephone, a straightforward black-and-white painting of an antiquated telephone. One of many hand-painted representations of quotidian objects the artist made during the early 1960s, it evolved out of his interest in elevating commercial imagery to fine-art status, and that positioned him at the forefront of the Pop art movement.
"National Velvet" by Andy Warhol (1963)
"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
'New Coke' by Andy Warhol (1985) in high resolution
"New Coke" was the unofficial name of the reformulation introduced in 1985 by The Coca-Cola Company to replace the original formulation of its flagship soft drink, Coca-Cola (aka Coke). Properly speaking, New Coke had no separate name of its own, but was simply known as "the new taste of Coca-Cola" until 1992 when it was renamed Coca-Cola II.
Public reaction to the change was poor, and the new cola was a major marketing failure. The subsequent reintroduction of Coke's original formula has been suspected to have resulted in a significant gain in sales.
A Caffeine Free New Coca-Cola version was also introduced at the same time. It was replaced by Caffeine Free Coca-Cola classic in 1990, which was the original 1983-1985 Caffeine Free Coca-Cola formula.
"Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century: Sarah Bernhardt." by Andy Warhol (1980) in high resolution
"Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century: Franz Kafka." by Andy Warhol (1980) in high resolution
'Hamburger' by Andy Warhol (1985-1986) in high resolution
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A duality of values is often reflected in American culture. For example, Americans value both the history of being pioneers in a new world—of being autonomous—while they also value being able to buy exactly the same things and have the same lifestyle as their neighbors. Individualism and conformity easily coexist. Advertisements present these divergent ideas, often within the same magazine or television time slot. Size is another concept with dual messages in American contemporary culture. The idea that “bigger is better” is validated by the sales of SUVs, super-sized soft drinks, and bulk food at Wal-Mart. In reverse, small-sized models sell the benefits of diet programs and fitness regimes designed to scale back people’s proportions. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol and other Pop artists illuminated such cultural trends through art and art making processes.
'Large Flowers' (One Orange, One Purple) by Andy Warhol (1964) in high resolution
The present work is one of only five monumental-scale paintings from Andy Warhol's famous Flowers series, which the artist showed at a sell-out exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1964 and with Galerie Sonnabend in Paris in May 1965. The two shows comprised of densely hung canvases of flowers in various sizes and brilliant Day-Glo hues, all appropriated by Warhol from a photograph of hibiscus blossoms that had appeared in the June 1964 issue of Popular Photography. Warhol was at the height of his creative powers and international fame, and as David Bourdon writes, the "cheerful and refreshing Flowers series includes some of Warhol's most lushly colored, decorative, and ingratiating paintings." (D. Bourdon)
The idea to paint flowers as the subject of a major series was apparently suggested to Warhol by Henry Geldzahler, then curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. To some degree, the pictures belong to a long art historical tradition of still-life painting. "With the Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we're doing my Flower period! Like Monet's water lillies, Van Gogh's flowers, the genre." (Gerard Malanga).
'Robert Mapplethorpe Portrait Unique' by Andy Warhol (1983) in high resolution
Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and naked men. The frank, homosexual eroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.
Inspired by Andy Warhol's film Chelsea Girls (1966), Robert Mapplethorpe moved to Manhattan in 1969 to meet the artist and to emulate him-in art, lifestyle, and material success. After he settled at the Chelsea Hotel, where segments of Warhol's film were shot, he began making photographs, often self-portraits or portraits of his roommate, the poet Patti Smith, and usually with a borrowed Polaroid camera.
Mapplethorpe's maturing approach to photography resembled Warhol's in many ways. He had no patience for the technical side of the medium and prided himself on gaining a reputation without ever having made a print himself. Portraiture was his main theme, and he used the camera as a means of making connections with celebrities, potential patrons, and possible lovers. In the 1980s, sales of Mapplethorpe's pictures soared. Warhol was commissioned to paint his portrait, so Mapplethorpe sat for the preparatory Polaroids, including this one. In turn, Warhol sat for Mapplethorpe in 1986.
'Double Marlon' by Andy Warhol (1966) in high resolution
Executed in 1966, Double Marlon celebrates a male icon. Warhol placed the double image of Marlon Brando, taken from his highly influential and controversial 1953 movie The Wild One, at the right-hand edge of a vast, deliberately unprimed canvas. Leaning languidly on his motorcycle's handlebars, dressed in the leather of his role as the menacing and rebellious biker gang leader, Brando is here presented as an equal to Warhol's other favored screen idols, be it Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor or Elvis Presley. And as in his works showing those stars, Double Marlon has a dark undercurrent. Where Marilyn had died, Liz was rumoured to be at death's door and Elvis was shown as a gun-toting cowboy, Brando oozes violence, volatility and antiestablishment subversion. Where Warhol celebrated those other stars in an array of works, he created only eight images of Marlon in 1966, and a single example on silver in 1963.
The Wild One was a hugely influential film at the time of its release, and was banned for many years in the United Kingdom and other countries for fear of copycat crime sprees and because of concerns that the film might glorify and glamorize violence and rebellion. It tells the story of a motorcycle gang -- the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (from which the band would later take its name) -- that descends upon a 1950s town, causing havoc. This chaos only increases when Chino -- played by Lee Marvin -- arrives with his rival gang, the Beetles (also considered by some to have inspired a band's name), intent on picking a fight with the B.R.M.C. The local townsfolk, though, take the law into their own hands and appear as the film's real villains, their actions resulting in the death of a kindly old man. Brando's character, Johnny, would serve as a template for bad boy characters for decades. Just as his role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire created a vogue for plain white tees, so too Johnny's leather jacket became a must-have for wannabe rebels throughout the United States. Once more, he had defined cool. Brando's brooding performance, his sheer beauty and minimal morals would all echo down the decades in the template of the antihero even this day.
It was only natural that, in 1963, Warhol should have turned to the image of Brando leaning on his motorbike to create a silver-backed altarpiece to cool, subsequently returning to it three years later in Double Marlon, where Brando's raw machismo is reflected in the rawness of the unprimed canvas. Brando's character in the film even has a Warholian aspect in some of his terse dialogue, especially in what are perhaps the most famous lines, when Kathie asks, "What're you rebelling against," to which he opaquely replies, "What've you got?" Johnny's all-out, motiveless, empty war on the status quo was arguably echoed in the gauntlet that Warhol himself would take up with Pop almost a decade later.
Warhol had long looked to cinema for his heroes and heroines as well as his inspiration. Long a worshipper of the silver screen, some of his best known and most celebrated images were those of the era's stars, who found themselves beneficiaries of a strange canonization. The promotional photos and postcards for a range of films became the raw materials which Warhol used to raise them onto new pedestals in the art gallery, within the hallowed realms of High Art. Simultaneously, Warhol, in his own Brando-like rebellion, undermined those selfsame hallowed realms by filling them with all-too-real and all-too-everyday emblems of the popular and the pulp. In his Marilyn, Liz or even his Campbell's Soup Cans, Warhol was gleefully undermining high-falutin' ideas about art and inspiration on the one hand while celebrating the banal on the other.
This would also become the case in Warhol's own movies, for it was at precisely the time that he created Double Marlon that Warhol was at the height of his own brief, meteoric cinematic career. This picture, executed in the same year as films such as The Chelsea Girls, shows how involved Warhol still was in film at the time, both as viewer and director. Warhol had long adulated the stars of the screen; at the same time, during the early 1960s, he had become a regular on the underground film circuit in New York, attending many viewings of experimental movies. From the moment in 1963 when he bought his own first camera, a Bolex limited to three-minute reels, he became a filmmaker, showing his own films on this same circuit. He was a fan of Hollywood movies, loving the glamour and the drama, while also being an inspired innovator in his own right. His films had come to be so important to him that, the year before he made Double Marlon, he had claimed that he had retired from making pictures, and in 1966 reiterated: "I don't paint any more, I gave it up about a year ago and just do movies now. I could do two things at the same time but movies are more exciting. Painting was just a phase I went through". He exaggerated, but it is noteworthy that Double Marlon dates from a period when he made relatively few pictures, focusing more on film. This shows his clear enthusiasm for the theme, while at the same time the composition of Double Marlon hints at his preoccupation with film: the vertical strip of the two shots of Brando comes to resemble a strip of celluloid, while the large space left deliberately in reserve, heightening the impact of the images, also resembles a screen awaiting projection. In this light, it even recalls the dual projection techniques that Warhol had used in The Chelsea Girls.
Warhol's return to the theme of the biker in 1966 may in part have had something to do with Scorpio Rising, a film made in 1964 by a fellow experimental cinematographer, Kenneth Anger.
Certainly in a 1966 interview, Warhol showed that he had seen and admired Anger's film, saying "Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising interested me, it's a strange film... it could have been better with a regular sound track, such as my Vinyl, which dealt somewhat with the same subject but was a sadism-masochism film. Scorpio was real but Vinyl was real, and not real, it was just a mood".
Anger's groundbreaking film featured a montage following a biker, Scorpio, shown preparing himself, donning his leather, joining a gang who make their engines roar, all culminating in a massive, chaotic party. All this was interspersed with a strange and bewildering array of images, played against a soundtrack that included Elvis and Ray Charles. Importantly, it was not only the technology of the motorcycles that was fetishized through lingering shots of gleaming metal, but also the bikers themselves, celebrated in lingering shots of gleaming skin.
Warhol's Double Marlon reflected the artist's own admiration of and possible desire for the handsome actor. The image of the biker, formerly the outcast and rebel, had been through the dual grinder of Warhol's art and Anger's films, resulting in an image that speaks of a different manner of outcast. At the same time, Warhol doubtless revelled in the chance to puncture the manly appearance of the menacing biker, subversively presenting Brando as, in several senses, a man's man. Warhol would take this notion to a new extreme when he created his own biker film, Bike Boy, the following year.
Warhol accentuates Brando's own sensuality, so evident in The Wild One and in this picture with the warm hues of the canvas itself. Double Marlon is exceptional in terms of depicting Brando, in terms of its scale, and also in terms of the experimental technique of its execution. Using the same screen he had used to create a silver image of the actor three years earlier, Warhol applied the inks to a raw, unprimed canvas, resulting in the unique visual effect of Double Marlon and its handful of sister pictures. In this picture, the effect is emphasized by the deliberate use of a large swath of canvas which has been left in reserve. This serves both to thrust the image's black inks into relief and to heighten awareness of the sensual texture of the canvas itself. Warhol celebrated the raw materials of painting, as well as the image, in Double Marlon.
The Catalogue Raisonné points out that the Marlon paintings relate to no commission or exhibition but were a spontaneous creation resulting from Warhol's own inspiration. This suggests that they may have been the Pop artist's retort to Clement Greenberg's advocacy of Post-Painterly Abstraction. Greenberg, the critic who had hailed Abstract Expressionism as the dawn of a new artistic age but who had so summarily dismissed Pop Art, believed that the purity and truth of the canvas could be revealed through the application, through non-gestural means, of color, as in the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, or in the deliberate techniques for staining the canvas used by Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. In this sense, the warm, glowing canvas that forms so much of Double Marlon is pure indeed, taking Greenberg at his word, forming a color field that bears no gestural signature of the artist, but whose distinct and emphatic figuration in the double image of Brando adds a sly, critical twist of the knife.
'Kiku' by Andy Warhol (1983) in high resolution
Capitalizing on Warhol's strong appeal to Japanese collectors, members of the Gendai Hanga Center in Tokyo asked Warhol in 1982 to create a body of work specifically for them, focusing in particular on images of flowers. Warhol agreed, and created a beautiful series of images inspired by the chrysanthemum (the traditional symbol representing the Japanese emperor and Imperial House). The exhibition was a success and Warhol's exquisite prints for the "Kiku" (the Japanese word for chrysanthemum) exhibition have since become highly regarded by both critics and collectors.
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