Flowers

“The Marilyn paintings are about life and death and the Flowers are with their black, menacing background … We kids—Andy used to call everyone a ‘kid’ until they were eighty-five years old—all knew about that. Lou Reed, Silver George Milloway, Ondine, and me—we all knew the dark side of those Flowers. Don’t forget, at that time, there was flower power and flower children. We were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children. Instead, we used to goof on it. We were into black leather and vinyl and whips and S&M and shooting up and speed. There was nothing flower power about that. So when Warhol and that whole scene made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement. And as decorative art, it’s pretty dense. There is a lot of depth in there ... You have this shadowy dark grass, which is not pretty, and then you have these big, wonderful, brightly colored flowers. It was always that juxtaposition that appears in his art again and again that I particularly love” Ronnie Coutrone
(R. Cutrone, quoted in, J. O’ Connor and B. Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York 1996, p. 61).