Description

Andy Warhol ‘Head with Flowers’ 1958

Head with Flowers 1958

Ink and colored ink wash (dye) on paper

Size : 21.10 x 29.80 cm

This illustration is typical of the work for which Warhol became renowned as a commercial artist in New York from the early 1950s. It demonstrates his intuitive blotted-line technique combined with the vibrant colours of the flowers, which bring the image to life. The coloured inks were possibly added at one of Warhol’s colouring parties, hosted at the fashionable Serendipity 3 café after its opening in 1954. He would encourage his friends – some of whom would have helped him create more of these ‘original’ illustrations – to colour the works with an inventiveness that adds to their whimsical nature. This process looks forward to the production methods of Warhol’s legendary studio, the Factory, in the 1960s.

Andy Warhol is known for his bright, colourful paintings and prints of subjects ranging from celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Mohammed Ali, to everyday products such as cans of soup and Brillo pads. But behind these iconic images are some surprising approaches and ideas. Through artworks in the ARTIST ROOMS collection, explore some of the things that made this iconic artist tick.

Head with Flowers 1958 is typical of Warhol’s illustrations. But he isn’t the only artist behind the work. He would often hold ‘colouring parties’, inviting his friends to multiply and add coloured inks to drawings like this one.

This collaborative, detached attitude to making art is one we see later in his career. In his 1960s studio – known as the Factory – he employed studio assistants to make works for him but signed by the true master. Warhol realised that he could increase the commercial productivity of his art more quickly by getting others involved in making it.

© 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London

Info on Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola, Jr. (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and member of highly diverse social circles that included Bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy patrons.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame.” In his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Andy Warhol Museum exists in memory of his life and artwork.

Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (now Carnegie Mellon University). In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising. During the 1950s, he gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style, and figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York. With the concurrent rapid expansion of the record industry and the introduction of the vinyl record, Hi-Fi, and stereophonic recordings, RCA Records hired Warhol, along with another freelance artist, Sid Maurer, to design album covers and promotional materials.

He began exhibiting his work during the 1950s. Amongst them, exhibitions at the Hugo Gallery, and the Bodley Gallery in New York City and in California his first one-man art-gallery exhibition was on July 9 1962, in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles. The exhibition marked his West Coast debut of pop art. Andy Warhol’s first New York solo pop art exhibition was hosted at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills. At the Stable Gallery exhibit, the artist met for the first time poet John Giorno who would star in Warhol’s first film, Sleep, in 1963.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell’s Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor.

Among the imagery tackled by Warhol were dollar bills, celebrities and brand name products. He also used as imagery for his paintings newspaper headlines or photographs of mushroom clouds, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters. Warhol also used Coca Cola bottles as subject matter for paintings.

Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success as from the 1970’s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the “bull market” of ’70 & ’80s New York art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and other so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as members of the Transavantgarde movement in Europe, including Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi. During this time Warhol created the Michael Jackson painting signifying his success attributed to his best-selling album Thriller.

By this period, Warhol was being criticized for becoming merely a “business artist”. In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects. They also criticized his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled Jewish Geniuses, which Warhol – who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews – had described in his diary as ‘They’re going to sell.’ In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol’s superficiality and commerciality as “the most brilliant mirror of our times,” contending that “Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s.