Flowers

A particularly vibrant and engaging example from Andy Warhol’s 1964 Flowers series, the present work exemplifies this particularly innovative and veracious period in which the artist attained full maturity. In the same year, Warhol established his first ‘Factory’ at 231 E 47^th Street in Manhattan, held his iconic Death and Disaster exhibition at Sonnabend gallery in Paris, exhibited his iconic film Empire at Stable Gallery; to culminate this celebrated year, Warhol inaugurated his winning collaboration with Leo Castelli with the first exhibition of Flowers, the works epitomizing the artist’s energetic movement from Pop towards abstraction. The present work contains a dazzling arrangement of four vividly colored hibiscus flowers—two yellow, one pink, and one orange—rendered onto an abstracted herbaceous green background. The variety and combination of this example is unique among the series in the twenty-four by twenty-four scale. These bright beaming bulbs gleam like beacons against their deep green roots, providing a thrilling encounter between humanity and nature.

While Warhol developed the Flowers works in this scale specifically to form a mosaic for the Castelli exhibition, the present lot was gifted directly to the artist’s brother, Paul Warhola, further accentuating the work’s special status within the series. Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler allegedly inspired Warhol to initiate the series after complaining about the morbidity of his Death and Disaster works. The curator offered up the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine opened to a page displaying a repeated color photograph of seven hibiscus flowers. The image, taken by the magazine’s editor Patricia Caulfield as an illustration for a new Kodak color processor, was repeated four times in a block with different tonal variations, perfect for Warhol’s appropriative practice of repetition.

The flower photograph was ideal for Warhol’s new silkscreen process, which granted him meticulous control over the work’s composition and execution whilst removing the appearance of the artist’s hand from the final canvas. Warhol altered the original image by cropping it into a square format, rotating one of the flowers and slightly disrupting the background’s pattern. This square format, closely resembling the aspect ratio of televisions at the time, appealed to Warhol’s aesthetic by distancing the work from traditional portrait or landscape orientations and offering multiple viewing perspectives. After this manipulation, Warhol had the work prepared for the screen printing process by directing his assistant Billy Name “to run the photo repeatedly through the Factory’s new photostat machine—‘a dozen times, at least,’ said Billy, to flatten out the blossoms, removing their definition, the shadow that lent the photo its illusion of three-dimensionality. ‘He didn’t want it to look like a photo at all. He just wanted the shape, the basic outline, of the flowers’” (T. Scherman and D. Dalton, op. cit., p. 247). By altering the original in such a way, the artist converted a seemingly generic photograph into an iconic image. Through manipulation and repetition, he was able to separate the end result from its origin and create a more universal symbol.

“With 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 lilies, van Gogh’s flowers, the genre.” (G. Malanga quoted in D. Dalton, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, London, 2003, p.74).

Idiomatic of the work’s immediate impact on the New York art world was renowned New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s praise for the series: “They are so goddamn beautiful. And so simple. And their glamour was so intense... That grainy look...was killer, and still is. I think it still hasn’t been acknowledged that the whole critical debate should have been over at that moment. Because these Flowers paintings had all the Kantian principles that Greenberg was pushing...The Flowers resolved all [those] formal issues...but with a realistic, not an abstract, image. And why not? Who bought it as a picture of flowers anyway? It was about the mediation...That’s why we reach for the word ‘genius.’ Genius is what goes, ‘That’s not a problem.’ He [Warhol] sees clearly. He just does it’” (P. Schjeldahl, quoted in T. Sherman and D. Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237).

Ostensibly—as per Geldzahler’s recommendation—the cheerful, bright allure of the Flowers marked a departure from Warhol’s previous output, where the tragic gazes of Marilyn, Jackie, Liz and Elvis had sat alongside images that highlighted the perils of a consumerist, image-obsessed society. However, the beauty and glamour of the Flowers was underscored by a familiar sense of dark trepidation. If floral subjects had long symbolized life’s transience—from the Dutch Golden Age to Van Gogh and beyond—the hibiscus blooms in Modern Photography seemed laden with foreboding. Flattened and compressed by the camera lens, these flowers were merely another subject for the consumer to devour: the wonders of nature were here subservient to the wonders of technology. Warhol’s ruthless manipulation and repetition of the photograph served to enhance this point, transforming an image of nature’s miraculous chaos into a serial icon. The mechanics of contemporary image production, these works seemed to say, had the power to turn anything and everything into a consumable, bite-sized entity. Only the spectral trace of the artist’s hand, evident to the keenest observers, betrayed the unique creative thrill that lay at their core.