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拍品专文
In his Vesuvius series of 1985, Andy Warhol transferred his obsession with celebrity to the natural world. The group is a remarkable outlier in his career: a collection of sixteen hand-painted works that capture the world’s most famous volcano as it erupts in plumes of smoke and fire. The present work is unique as Warhol’s only monochrome painting of the mountain on this scale. It featured as the back cover for the catalogue of the series’ exhibition at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, in 1985. The majority of the works feature bright, crisp colours rendered in acrylic, with the graphic immediacy of the Golden Age of comic books. This version is instead a stark composition of black brushstrokes and lines on a white backdrop. Warhol’s marks have a furious energy and a sense of spontaneity, like an exclamation mark turned into painting form. He wanted each painting to feature ‘the impression of having been painted just one minute after the eruption.’ His favourite colours, he said, were black and white: ‘Because most photographs are black and white. These two colours impress our memory for a longer time’ (A. Warhol quoted in Vesuvius by Warhol, exh. cat. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples 1985, p. 36).
For all its vivid colouration and Pop irreverence, Warhol’s art is often concerned with mortality. In his celebrated screenprint series of the 1960s, including his Car Crashes and Electric Chairs, he looked at death as a spectacle. With Vesuvius, Warhol turned his eye to nature as the deliverer of extravagant destruction. Mount Vesuvius is a geological embodiment of potential ruin, hulking over the Bay of Naples. It has long attracted artists. For the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries such as J. M. W. Turner, it represented the sublime, fearsome power of the natural world—beauty and oblivion tied together. The eighteenth-century French painter Pierre-Jacques Volaire painted over thirty scenes of Vesuvius in eruption, pre-empting the repetition of Warhol’s series, returning again and again to the calamity.
Vesuvius enjoys a special place in Warhol’s career. It was his first return to hand-painting since he had started screenprinting in 1962. The series was commissioned for an exhibition at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples’ prestigious museum of Old Master art. Warhol was only the second contemporary artist to be allowed to exhibit there. He had first visited the Mezzogiorno metropolis in 1975 at the invitation of the gallerist Lucio Amelio. He was immediately captivated by the chaotic city and its towering volcano: a star equal to the Empire State Building and Marilyn Monroe. In 1980 he met the great German mystical artist Joseph Beuys there. In Naples, writes Michele Bonuomo, ‘one can meet to represent and consume impossible passions, always hovering between earth and sky, ecstasy and nightmare’ (M. Bonuomo in ibid., p. 33). Vesuvius immortalises the city’s contradictions.
For all its vivid colouration and Pop irreverence, Warhol’s art is often concerned with mortality. In his celebrated screenprint series of the 1960s, including his Car Crashes and Electric Chairs, he looked at death as a spectacle. With Vesuvius, Warhol turned his eye to nature as the deliverer of extravagant destruction. Mount Vesuvius is a geological embodiment of potential ruin, hulking over the Bay of Naples. It has long attracted artists. For the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries such as J. M. W. Turner, it represented the sublime, fearsome power of the natural world—beauty and oblivion tied together. The eighteenth-century French painter Pierre-Jacques Volaire painted over thirty scenes of Vesuvius in eruption, pre-empting the repetition of Warhol’s series, returning again and again to the calamity.
Vesuvius enjoys a special place in Warhol’s career. It was his first return to hand-painting since he had started screenprinting in 1962. The series was commissioned for an exhibition at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples’ prestigious museum of Old Master art. Warhol was only the second contemporary artist to be allowed to exhibit there. He had first visited the Mezzogiorno metropolis in 1975 at the invitation of the gallerist Lucio Amelio. He was immediately captivated by the chaotic city and its towering volcano: a star equal to the Empire State Building and Marilyn Monroe. In 1980 he met the great German mystical artist Joseph Beuys there. In Naples, writes Michele Bonuomo, ‘one can meet to represent and consume impossible passions, always hovering between earth and sky, ecstasy and nightmare’ (M. Bonuomo in ibid., p. 33). Vesuvius immortalises the city’s contradictions.