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拍品专文
Bringing the sitter to life across two radiant canvases, the present pictures of Cardi Smith (Madame Smith) (1974) are a striking pair of Andy Warhol’s celebrated ‘society portraits.’ The subject is Cardi Smith, the wife of Danish businessman and collector Hans Smith. Warhol had met the couple at a gallery they owned in Monte Carlo in May 1974: they were later photographed with the artist beneath their finished portraits in their home. Cardi appears here in two slightly different poses derived from Warhol’s Polaroid photographs, her chin resting on her hand. Luminous underpainting in blue, green, pink and purple glows through the black ink of the silkscreen, emerging in zigzagging wet-on-wet strokes against a white ground. Warhol highlights her lips and eyeshadow with Marilyn-esque drama: bright colours accentuate an embroidered pattern in her sleeve, a huge, square-cut jewel on her finger, and the reddish waves of her hair. With their courtly echoes—Smith’s pose recalls Ingres’ bejewelled portrait of Madame Moitessier (1856, National Gallery, London)—the works are a vision of decadent glamour.
Warhol made his first commissioned portrait in 1963, for the collector Ethel Scull. Ethel Scull 36 Times (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), shows the sitter in multiple images across a large, multi-coloured silkscreen grid. The source photographs were taken by Scull herself: Warhol had her pose in a Photomat in Times Square, snapping over a hundred from which he made his selection. By the time he made Cardi Smith (Madame Smith), Warhol had codified a different method for his ‘society portraits’, which formed a major part of his output from the 1970s onwards. He would begin by taking Polaroids—sometimes asking his subjects to wear pale make-up that would heighten the image’s contrast—before blowing the negatives up to create silkscreens, which were then printed onto painted canvases. Having employed the medium since the early 1960s, Warhol was able to create sophisticated effects in these later works, layering different colours and electrifying their features with hand-painted details.
Warhol, who sometimes wryly referred to himself as ‘just a travelling society painter’, always used the same 40-by-40-inch format for these works, explaining that they needed to be of identical size so that they could all be displayed together as one enormous ‘portrait of society.’ This tongue-in-cheek idea conveys an important truth about Warhol’s practice. By fashioning himself as a modern-day court artist—not unlike the Singer Sargents and van Dycks before him who pictured the great and good of their time—he disavowed the ascetic Minimal and Conceptual tendencies that dominated the American art world during the 1970s. He instead struck a pose of unabashed fascination with celebrity and splendour, and captured a unique record of the people who defined his own era.
The ‘society portraits’ feature a diverse range of luminaries, from Albert Einstein and Truman Capote to Prince, Diana Ross, Yves Saint Laurent, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, and Warhol’s own mother, Julia Warhola. He made his sitters into icons, commodities ready to be bought and sold, in a way that mirrored the workings of celebrity itself. Unlike his early Pop screenprints of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, however—which were based on found images—these works were all lensed in person by Warhol, who was by this time a star in his own right and sought after for commissions by clients worldwide. Accordingly they take on a self-reflexive quality, testifying to the position the artist himself had attained among the leading lights of the age. Cardi Smith joins Warhol’s pantheon in blazing colour, under the immortalising spell of the artist’s gaze.
Warhol made his first commissioned portrait in 1963, for the collector Ethel Scull. Ethel Scull 36 Times (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), shows the sitter in multiple images across a large, multi-coloured silkscreen grid. The source photographs were taken by Scull herself: Warhol had her pose in a Photomat in Times Square, snapping over a hundred from which he made his selection. By the time he made Cardi Smith (Madame Smith), Warhol had codified a different method for his ‘society portraits’, which formed a major part of his output from the 1970s onwards. He would begin by taking Polaroids—sometimes asking his subjects to wear pale make-up that would heighten the image’s contrast—before blowing the negatives up to create silkscreens, which were then printed onto painted canvases. Having employed the medium since the early 1960s, Warhol was able to create sophisticated effects in these later works, layering different colours and electrifying their features with hand-painted details.
Warhol, who sometimes wryly referred to himself as ‘just a travelling society painter’, always used the same 40-by-40-inch format for these works, explaining that they needed to be of identical size so that they could all be displayed together as one enormous ‘portrait of society.’ This tongue-in-cheek idea conveys an important truth about Warhol’s practice. By fashioning himself as a modern-day court artist—not unlike the Singer Sargents and van Dycks before him who pictured the great and good of their time—he disavowed the ascetic Minimal and Conceptual tendencies that dominated the American art world during the 1970s. He instead struck a pose of unabashed fascination with celebrity and splendour, and captured a unique record of the people who defined his own era.
The ‘society portraits’ feature a diverse range of luminaries, from Albert Einstein and Truman Capote to Prince, Diana Ross, Yves Saint Laurent, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, and Warhol’s own mother, Julia Warhola. He made his sitters into icons, commodities ready to be bought and sold, in a way that mirrored the workings of celebrity itself. Unlike his early Pop screenprints of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, however—which were based on found images—these works were all lensed in person by Warhol, who was by this time a star in his own right and sought after for commissions by clients worldwide. Accordingly they take on a self-reflexive quality, testifying to the position the artist himself had attained among the leading lights of the age. Cardi Smith joins Warhol’s pantheon in blazing colour, under the immortalising spell of the artist’s gaze.