Chanel 345 is a screenprint by Andy Warhol created in 1985. The work depicts a bottle of Chanel perfume, and belongs to the artist’s Ads series, which features pop art renditions of popular advertisements of the 1980s.

A screen print born in 1985, Chanel 354 takes its regal seat in Andy Warhol’s Ads portfolio composed of 10 screen prints. The Chanel 354 is as rare as it is fabulous with only 190 edition prints of the perfume created. Reckoning back to his beginnings as an advertisement artist fresh out of college, Chanel 354’s lustrous bottle holds an irresistible feminine energy and appears to a buyer’s desire to acquire beautiful items and the aura of affluence. Chanel 354 is a testament to the fascination with attainable glamour that was a staple of Warhol’s “American Dream” philosophy depicted in his style that gained widespread commercial success from the appropriation of culturally prominent images and products.

Throughout his career, Warhol maintained his immortal-chic illusion not only with these recycled, glamorized images, but also with the curation of his own personal visage, which included a fascination with perfume. The artist considered perfume as a way to “take up more space;” he collected “semi-used bottles”, and was even buried with a bottle of Estee Lauder’s “Beautiful” when he died in 1987. Needless to say, Chanel 354 was inevitable.

In Chanel 354, Chanel No. 5’s luxurious scent practically wafts off the print page. The body of the bottle glows in vivid color against a dark gradient, making it look as if it could be picked off the page and spritzed. The bottle represents the Warholian theme of consumerism in pursuit of an opulent (Americanized) lifestyle to perfection, its message in synchronicity with the Chanel luxury brand to tempt the masses to indulge in just a sweet taste of richness. Chanel No. 5 remains as well-known as Andy Warhol’s works and was the signature scent of recurrent Warhol muse Marilyn Monroe, confirming that the Pop artist understood exactly the capitalistic society he both cleverly portrayed and attracted with his work.

Little speaks to Warhol’s obsession with consumerist culture better than his Ads portfolio, which was commissioned by Ronald Feldman of Feldman Fine Arts. The Ads portfolio is made up of Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean), Blackglama (Judy Garland), Paramount, Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan), The New Spirit (Donald Duck), Mobil, Apple, Volkswagen, Life Savers, and of course, Chanel 354.

From his 1985 Ads series, Apple 359 is a screenprint created by Andy Warhol that has appropriated the logo for Macintosh Computers. The logo, which is now as ubiquitous as the fruit itself, maintains the original design and rainbow color scheme, but Warhol adds his trademark sketched lines and vibrant hues to give the original design an unmistakably Warholian influence. He was commissioned by Del Yocam, the first COO of Apple, as a part of the company’s advertising campaign. The same year this print was created, Warhol encountered Steve Jobs (the founder of Apple) and wrote in his diary about the meeting: “he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll soon make it in color… I felt so old and out of it with this whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.”

In his Ads series, Warhol explores how these widely recognized emblems, trademarks and logos have become symbolic to the American consumer, whether they are aware of it or not. The series contains images ranging from the Mobil Gas logo to Judy Garland as a spokeswoman for Blackglama Furs. There is no explicit pattern in the images Warhol selected to choose, other than their formation as advertisements for large corporations (with the majority of them being American). While this series was not created until towards the end of his life, these images belong to advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s.

Photo credit: Steve Jobs showing Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf how to use a Macintosh computer that Sean Lennon received for his 9th birthday, in 1984. Courtesy of Vintage Everyday, New York.

Apple 359 is a screenprint created by Andy Warhol that has appropriated the logo for Macintosh Computers. The logo, which is now as ubiquitous as the fruit itself, maintains the original design and rainbow color scheme. However, Warhol adds his trademark sketched lines and vibrant hues to give the original design an unmistakably Warholian influence.

The Apple screenprint hails from Warhol’s Ads series, published in 1985 by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. The portfolio comprises iconic advertising imagery from the 1950s through the 1980s, showcasing famous ads from the likes of Chanel, Life savers, and Disney.

Commissioned by Del Yocam, Apple’s very first COO, Apple 359 came just one year after the first Macintosh model was released by the electronics company. It was well-timed as Warhol’s famously commercialistic style no doubt made an imprint on buyers everywhere. Though the Pop-Artist’s version of the starring apple of the Macintosh brand mirrors that of the original emblem, the work still incorporates Warhol’s flamboyant flair. The apple, alive with color, is a rainbow layered over a background that resembles something of clouds in a sunset. A playful canvas for a seriously successful business, the Macintosh legacy looks as if it was written in crayon.

Andy Warhol met Apple’s founder Steve Jobs in 1985, the year of Apple 359’s genesis. It was Sean Lennon’s ninth birthday party and everyone sat around and explored the magic of Macpaint on a Macintosh model Sean received as a gift from Jobs. Warhol wrote in his diaries of the event: “I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now… I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.” Jobs clearly didn’t feel slighted as he taught Warhol how to paint on the model that same evening.

Alongside Apple, Warhol’s Ads portfolio reinvents the most notable of emblems, trademarks, and logos and speaks to the subconscious influence branding has on American consumption patterns. At its center, the portfolio is an exploration of pop culture and how celebrity becomes even more celebrity through branded imagery. Made up of iconography from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Ads encompasses Mobil Gas, Blackgama, Chanel, Rebel Without a Cause, Paramount, Van Heusen, Volkswagen, Life Savers, and of course, Apple.

The Blackglama 351 Trial Proof is a unique version of Andy Warhol’s Blackglama print from his Ads series, published in 1985. The work depicts famous actress Judy Garland in a red coat against a yellow background, contrasting with her dark hair.

Warhol was inspired by Judy Garland’s advertising campaign for Blackglama Fur company and their ubiquitous tagline “What becomes a Legend most?” Many legends of style and pop culture have modeled for the company over the years, including Diana Ross, Bridget Bardot, Lauren Bacall, Julie Andrews, Ray Charles and Marlene Dietrich. Known for her starring role in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland was described by Fred Astaire as “the greatest entertainer who ever lived.” She also had major roles in movies like Meet Me in St. Louis (1945) and had a brief marriage to American director Vincente Minnelli.

Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s. Warhol’s fascination with the commercial world continued throughout his career as an artist. As a result, he created the Ads portfolio based on popular advertising campaigns and logos in contemporary American culture. These advertisements were not simply a means to sell products, but had become an integral part of American culture. Warhol included the Paramount, Apple and Mobilgas logos in the Ads series, as well as advertisements that featured well known celebrities, such as Ronald Reagan for Van Heusen apparel.

Van Heusen 356 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from the artist’s Ads series, published in 1985. The series depicts ten famous images from mass media from the latter half of the twentieth century, as Warhol re-imagines popular and effective advertisements and propagandist media. Ads was commissioned and published by Ronald Feldman, a politically-minded art dealer who worked with Warhol on many of his projects in the 1980s.

This portrait of former President Ronald Reagan looks a little bit different than the one that would have hung in the White House Hall. In fact, Van Heusen 356 is a screenprint that takes Reagan’s likeness from before he was president. An actor first, Reagan worked as a film star until the mid-60’s and even served a “term” as an ambassador for Van Heusen shirts. The print hops off of the page like a 3D comic illustration, and despite the outline following the original advertisement, Warhol presents it with a dystopian cast. The anaglyphic Reagan’s light, cheerful countenance juxtaposed with the bold, slogan print holds an intensity that evokes a new color TV. Above, in a strip of photos not unlike a film roll, a paranormal-esque Ronald Reagan follows directions and twists, twirls, bends, and curls, the no-wrinkle shirt.

Warhol’s career began in the 1950’s as a commercial illustrator when Reagan was still regularly on the big screen. A Democrat, Warhol initially tried to avoid creating portraits of Ronald Reagan. However, close friend and business associate Bob Colacello (a Republican) first pushed Warhol to the idea years before Ads when trying to cunningly position the artist to do a portrait by speaking with Reagan prior to an agreement from Warhol. Years down the road, it would seem that the Van Heusen print was not the only work that pointed to a Ronald Reagan influence, regardless of the initial opposition. Reagan was also the host of television series “General Electric Theatre,” the logo of which Warhol used ample times in his oeuvre. With Ronald Reagan’s trifecta of being an actor, a 1950s household name, and the then-most well-known politician of the age… nothing could stand in the way of Warhol eventually depicting the notable in one manner or another.

As a whole, Warhol’s Ads series fully encompasses the artist’s obsession with celebrity, fame, and nostalgia. The portfolio explores the most recognizable of faces, slogans, and products throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—sometimes with a twist. But as always, Warhol saw well-known images as ripe for recreation, and a great opportunity to attract the eyes of his society. The rest of the Ads portfolio includes Paramount, Mobilgas, Apple, Life Savers, Blackgama (Judy Garland), The New Spirit (Donald Duck), Chanel, Rebel Without a Cause, and Volkswagen.

Volkswagen 358, sometimes referred to as “lemon,” is a screenprint created by Andy Warhol for his Ads series in 1985, featuring an ad for a Volkswagen car that was published in 1960. Warhol portrays the iconic car in a vibrant green and yellow against a dark purple background that emphasizes the iconism of both the car and the advertisement itself.

The infamous ad depicted in Volkswagen 358 is commonly referred to as “Lemon,” or “the Lemon ad,” and it changed the advertising world during the mid 20th century. In the late 1950s, after World War II, Volkswagen (VW) was eager to sell their cars in America and compete with leading automotive brands. The obvious problem was that VW was created under Adolf Hitler’s direct supervision, and now the company needed to market their vehicles to thousands of veterans returning to the US (who were all buying cars at record rates). By referring to their car as a Lemon (a defective or cheaply made foreign car) VW presents a very counterintuitive and unexpected advertising campaign. The use of this self-deprecating humor proved to be extremely effective, though, and many have said that the Volkswagen ads of the late 50s and early 60s changed the marketing world forever.

The gist of the ad is basically this: VW presents what appears to be a brand new, spotless Volkswagen bug, then labels it a lemon. The copy goes on to say that VW’s cars are so carefully inspected, that even scratches that are hardly visible to the human eye are considered cause enough to return the car to the production line and replace the “defective part.” Such a genius and era-defining marketing campaign makes this advertisement perfect for Warhol’s Ads portfolio.

In Ads, Warhol explores how these widely recognized emblems, trademarks and logos have become symbolic to the American consumer. Volkswagen recently reproduced their iconic Beetle ad with their new electric van, suggesting, like Warhol, that their advertising is timeless. At first glance, Warhol’s inclusion of the German car among his other Ads prints is an interesting choice, as the reception of the Volkswagen Beetle in the United States was initially divisive. But it’s clear that Warhol created Volkswagen 358 with a clear understanding of the impact that VW made on the advertisement industry.

As much as Ads is a nostalgic collection of the most timeless images of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, it’s also one that encapsulates Warhol’s pervasive infatuation with fame, glamour, and the culture around consumption habits. In the series, we see one of Warhol’s primary philosophies at work: “Being good in business is the best kind of art.”

Volkswagen along with the rest of the portfolio was commissioned and published by art dealer Ronald Feldman, who worked with Warhol on many projects in the 1980s. Alongside Volkswagen, the rest of the Ads portfolio includes Paramount, Mobilgas, Apple, Life Savers, Blackgama (Judy Garland), The New Spirit (Donald Duck), Chanel, Rebel Without a Cause, and Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan).

After The Party is a screenprint on paper that depicts a dinner party. Warhol was known for abundant partying and a lively lifestyle, and this image depicts the chaos inherent to that lifestyle.

Beatles by Andy Warhol was created in 1980 and is a striking example of Warhol’s iconic use of pop art techniques to depict cultural figures. The piece features the four members of the Beatles, each rendered in a vibrant, flat color scheme that is typical of Warhol’s style.

Warhol’s choice of colors—magenta and pink—gives the artwork a bold, eye-catching look that plays with the conventions of celebrity portraiture. The use of non-naturalistic colors and the repetition of the figure style are hallmarks of Warhol’s approach to pop art, emphasizing the mass-produced, commodified nature of celebrity images.

The simplicity of the composition and the uniformity of the style across all four portraits create a sense of cohesion, despite each figure being individually stylized. This method underscores the collective identity of the Beatles as a globe-trotting band, rather than four separate individuals.

In terms of symbolism, Warhol’s use of color and form can be understood as a commentary on the public and media’s consumption of celebrity images. The bright, almost commercial colors suggest the commodification of celebrity status, while the stylized and simplified rendering reflects the way media distills complex human figures into easily recognizable and consumable icons.

This artwork not only captures the visual aesthetic typical of Warhol but also engages with deeper themes of fame, media representation, and the artifice inherent in the celebrity culture, which were recurring subjects in his work.

Brooklyn Bridge 290 by Andy Warhol demonstrates the artist’s signature color block technique to create a three dimensional aesthetic. His use of bold colors such as red, blue, green and black create a harmony and a depth within the print. Warhol was commissioned to created this iconic work for the Brooklyn Bridge’s 100th Anniversary. Warhol’s depiction of the bridge gives a playful humor to the celebration of the structure in his distinct style. Additionally, Warhol’s image served as the official artwork for the citywide event.

Brooklyn Bridge 290 by Andy Warhol as Part of His Larger Body of Work
Unlike his other series, Warhol decided to use an offset printing technique for Brooklyn Bridge, which is aesthetically different from his typical works. Although we have seen the color blocking in other works, we are introduced into a more complicated offsetting of the subject printed next to it’s first run. The bridge is printed in a way that it jets off into the distance, where it’s beginning and ending are ambiguous. The print is different from any standard photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge. The color and composition in Warhol’s work brings a surrealism to the mundane subject, which has been catalogued thousands of times by thousands of artists. Warhol’s take on the bridge is nothing less than completely pop art and excessively Warholian.

Camouflage (Unique) is a screenprint by Andy Warhol from the artist’s Camouflage series from 1987. Unlike the regular edition of the prints, this Camouflage is printed vertically, with a height of 40 inches and a width of 32 inches.

The Camouflage portfolio of 8 screenprints demonstrates Warhol’s play with the abstract, yet recognizable design in a variety of fluorescent, inorganic colors. Camouflage appealed to Warhol because it held this dual-significance of an abstract form that was familiar to the American population. He also wanted to address America’s continuing military involvement in the Middle East. Therefore, he opted to utilize the camouflage design as a dedication to their efforts in war. However, Warhol added his own Pop Art signature touch by using colors to transform a disguising pattern, into one of high attention.

Today, Camouflage is a common motif in fashion and design, though that wasn’t the case during Warhol’s time. In fact, Warhol’s ventures in camouflage extended directly to the fashion world in collaboration with designer Stephen Sprouse, when the two designed a series of clothing featuring Warhol’s camo design. Their barrier-breaking work paved the way for camouflage of all colors to be flaunted as streetwear today.

Andy Warhol introduced many dualities with his version of the Camouflage. The use of inorganic, synthetic colors paired with the organic shapes and forms in the abstract design presented juxtapositions between identity and disguise. While militants relied on the traditional camouflage pattern to help conceal them, the fashion industry favored Warhol’s camouflage use to help attract attention in the urban setting. This also paralleled Warhol’s lifelong balance between a life of fame he yearned for and the quiet, private life he also wanted to maintain.

Camouflage (Trial Proof) is a screen print by Andy Warhol from 1987. The work was published as part of the artist’s Camouflage portfolio, which includes eight different colorful designs of a typical camouflage pattern.

Camouflage (Trial Proof) cannot camouflage its greatness. This screenprint stems from Andy Warhol’s Camouflage portfolio, the last series created before his untimely passing. As a trial proof, the vibrant piece never made the cut to be considered as part of the final collection, enhancing the rarity of the one-of-a-kind design. Camouflage was born when Jay Shriver, Warhol’s artistic assistant, invited Warhol to join him in exploring a new technique: painting through fabric. Acquiring an authentic camo print from a military surplus store, a marriage of a familiar pattern and intoxicating pigmentation was consummated, expanding Warhol’s relationship with abstract expressionism. While camouflage traditionally represents the necessity to blend in, the artist’s version vibrates with color, likening itself to a runway print more than a uniform. In fact, Warhol’s ventures in camouflage extended directly to the fashion world in collaboration with designer Stephen Sprouse and their barrier-breaking work paved the way for camouflage of all colors to be flaunted as streetwear today.

Always dabbling in the philosophical, Warhol seized the opportunity to redefine the meaning of camouflage with his abstract-adjacent style in the Camouflage series. Going so far as to layer the pattern with his own portrait in 1986, the King of Pop Art poses a meaningful challenge to its viewers: how do we mask ourselves in everyday life? In that same year, Warhol also used a camouflage design in the making of his Joseph Beuys in Memoriam print.

Before his passing, Warhol did leave behind a completed Camouflage collection consisting of eight transfer paintings, but without signing and printing his works. To lay the brilliance of the iconic artist’s final endeavor to rest, Rupert Jasen Smith printed the series, now bearing the name and stamp of authenticity of the executor of The Estate of Andy Warhol. Not without melancholy, Camouflage (Trial Proof) serves as a reminder of the utter uniqueness of Andy Warhol to the very end.

Unlike Warhol’s other series, in which trial proofs can be identified easily by the singular image they depict, this Camouflage trial proof using the same design as two of the regular edition Camouflages (408 and 409), but completely different colors. Therefore, it may be categorized as FS.IIB408, FS.IIB409, followed by its edition number.

Andy Warhol’s Camouflage complete portfolio was printed in 1987 by his close friend and collaborator, Rupert Jasen Smith. Warhol’s Camouflage screenprints were the final works published before his death the same year. While still alive, Warhol had the opportunity to exhibit the Camouflage screenprints only once at a group show in New York, 1986.

The pop artist was inspired to create the Camouflage complete portfolio after his assistant, Jay Shriver, shared with Warhol that he was working on abstract paintings by pushing paint through the mesh of the military cloth. Warhol had Shriver go to the local New York army surplus store near Union Station to buy some camouflage fabric. Once Shriver had returned with the fabric, it was then photographed and the mesh was removed to only reveal the shapes and patterns of the fabric. Changing the originally muted militaristic color scheme to vivid pop colors, Warhol appropriated the everyday pattern into striking abstract pieces of pop art.

Warhol also collaborated with Stephen Sprouse, a notable fashion designer, to create a clothing line that focused on pop art camouflage. Shortly after, Warhol continued his interest in the pattern and created one of his most famous self-portraits, which was layered with a camouflage print.

It was not until after Warhol died that the Camouflage series was printed, so he never got the opportunity to sign his works. However, Warhol’s Camouflage prints — an abstract yet iconic form — are an enduring testament to the artist’s obsession with a shared, mass-produced visual language. The Camouflage complete portfolio consists of eight screenprints that are printed on Lenox Museum Board. Each print is signed and numbered in pencil on verso by the executor of The Estate of Andy Warhol, with a stamped certificate of authenticity. The screenprints included in Warhol’s Camouflage complete portfolio are FS II.406 through FS II.413.

Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) 4A by Andy Warhol includes highly iconic imagery that is widely recognizable in the Pop Art movement. Once again, Warhol takes the ever-present American pantry staple and transforms it into high art—this time on a shopping bag. Warhol, originally a commercial graphic artist, found the imagery of the Campbell’s soup label a powerful visual tool. The soup cans could represent the role of mass consumerism in postwar American society. This particular work is a special addition to Warhol’s Campbell’s suite, as it is printed onto a shopping bag, adding another layer of irony to the work in its use.

Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) 4A as Part of Andy Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) 4A and the rest of the artist’s Campbell’s-inspired creations became legitimate subjects of modern still life during postwar American society. In the 1960s, Warhol had just started to experiment with screenprinting, a medium commonly used in the mass production of consumer goods, and one that would change the art world forever. Some of the most famous and recognizable images in art history come from Warhol’s experiments with Campbell’s Soup imagery. This is mostly because of his screenprinting process and the decision to depict such banal subject matter, which helped redefine and complicate the concept of high art. This print was created in 1966 for an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio by Andy Warhol consists of ten prints of Campbell’s Soup cans from 1968. It is one of the artist’s most famous and controversial series, which helped him champion the Pop Art movement. It is Warhol’s second series Campbell’s Soup Can prints, debuting six years after his original 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings and followed by the Campbell’s Soup Cans II portfolio from 1969. The thirty-two canvases that make up the original Campbell’s Soup Cans series include hand-painted illustrations of thirty-two different flavors of Campbell’s soup. The star of Warhol’s first solo gallery exhibition in 1962, the original Campbell’s Soup Cans series is one of his earliest, most compelling works.

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio mixes his signature mass-production techniques with individualized details, such as hand-lettering on the labels. This detail juxtaposes the pains Warhol took when mimicking the uniformity and repetition of advertisements. For example, Warhol used a combination of projection and tracing to reduce differences between his paintings of the cans. For the Fleur de Lys pattern on the bottom of each can, he created a stamp in order to avoid hand-painting each symbol.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio further mechanizes Warhol’s art by turning his paintings into uniform screenprints. The suite is one of the first portfolios in which Warhol used screenprinting, and one of the first publications by Factory Additions, a company Warhol developed to distribute his prints. The portfolio includes ten different Campbell’s Soup cans. Each print features one of the thirty-two flavors included in the initial series. Some of the flavors include Black Bean 44, Chicken Noodle 45, Tomato 46, and Cream of Mushroom 53. Campbell’s Soup Cans II followed Campbell’s Soup Cans I in 1969, and contains ten additional screenprints of canvases from the original Campbell’s Soup Cans series with additional illustrations. Campbell’s Soup Cans I features some of the most widely recognized prints from the entire collection.

Warhol’s fascination with the Campbell’s soup can as an object of commercialization continued long past these series. He revisited the theme at many points in his career, changing color palettes and manipulating images. The Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio, however, marks the beginning of Warhol’s use of this theme and one of the first instances of Warhol’s use of what is now considered his signature medium.

Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio reflects the monotony and repetitive characteristics of advertising, examining everyday objects as fine art. Of his decision to depict soup cans, Warhol said, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” In the Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio, Warhol turns his daily meal into an iconic work of art. Moreover, he engages with the mass production techniques that are so ingrained in our lives, truly fulfilling his wish of becoming “a machine.”

Campbell’s Soup Cans I Complete Portfolio as Part of Andy Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
One of Warhol’s most iconic portfolios, Campbell’s Soup Cans I, is recognizable by even beginner Warhol enthusiasts. It was with these soup cans that Warhol started to become a household name. When Warhol first showed the soup cans in California they created quite a stir. Even though Warhol is mostly connected to New York, he had an impact and connection with the art and artists in California in the early 60s. The semi-mechanized process he used to create these works became a key characteristic of Warhol’s art. He continued to play with the imagery of the soup can by contorting and altering them. However, it is the classic, simple version that continues to be the most popular and bring in new collectors. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans I complete portfolio helped to usher in the Pop Art movement that endures today, renewed and rediscovered by artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans II complete portfolio by Andy Warhol comprises 10 prints of the iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans, heralding nostalgia and familiarity. As his third work rendering the common American pantry item, it follows his breakout thirty-two piece series, Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), and the 1968 Campbell’s Soup Cans I. The Campbell’s design became high art in Warhol’s series, anchoring its name as a pop culture icon, and Warhol’s as the Prince of Pop Art.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans II screen prints show a variation of 10 different Campbell’s soup flavors. Each can rests in the center of it’s frame, where it aligns exactly with the other sets of images. This symmetry and regularity gave the entire portfolio a uniform, mass-produced aesthetic that Warhol aimed for. The cans appear graphic and animated like the labels on the actual soup cans, and share the bold shades of red, yellow, and white with black print lettering that resembles the true Campbell’s style. Warhol decided to include hyper-realistic detailing of shadows and refracting light on the tin lids, making each can slightly unique to its counterpart. The works likenesses to one another are further broken with different flavors, slogan design and colors.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans II complete portfolio expands creatively from Campbell’s Soup I with bolder, brighter colors, the addition of slogans and catch-phrases to connect viewers to the product, and more versatility with shape and directionality. Certain deviations from the original portfolio can be seen throughout the series in prints like Hot Dog Bean, Vegetarian Vegetable, and Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s. Campbell’s Soup Cans II, like the original series, was created via silkscreening. Traditionally used in advertising for it’s precise and bold graphics to grab viewer’s attention, Andy Warhol harnessed this effect with the intent of transforming advertisement into art. Warhol drew on this business-art motif of a Campbell’s Soup can, but he transformed the static, consumable function of the can into something desired outside of function and as an object worthy of artistic reflection.

Campbell’s Soup was something of convenience and routine for Andy Warhol. “I used to drink it,” he famously said. “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” It was ultimately the perfect image to replicate and produce on a broad scale. It’s overt simplicity and lack of self expression made for a lot of criticism. It seemed too commercial, too repeatable, to be considered high art. As apathetic Campbell’s Soup Cans II may seem though, it explores the concept that art should not have to be personal, nor must it be a deep, transcendent masterpiece. The Campbell’s Soup Cans II complete portfolio is the antithesis of expressive artistic norms. But all the while, it embraces social norms and everyday, recognizable objects.

Ultimately, the Campbell’s Soup Cans II prints and Warhol’s previous soup cans helped to redefine art. As an objective statement collection meant to turn heads and force viewers to think about how and what they consume, both food and art related, it defines an era where the conventional and the mundane could become extraordinarily powerful tools (via Pop Art).

Campbell’s Soup Cans II Complete Portfolio as Part of Andy Warhol’s Larger Body of Work

Warhol’s collection of prints representing Campbell’s soup cans is arguably his most iconic and widely recognized endeavor. The Campbell’s Soup Cans portfolios represent many themes that Warhol continued to work with throughout his career, including the powerful role that mass consumption plays in postwar society. The semi-mechanized process he used to create these works is a staple characteristic of his creative process. This series helped to usher in the Pop Art movement that endures today, renewed and rediscovered by artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Campbell’s Soup Cans I: Cream of Mushroom 53 by Andy Warhol is one of ten screenprints from his 1968 Campbell’s Soup Cans I portfolio. The print itself is very straightforward in its design, color, and symmetrical shape. As a concept, the print reflects Warhol’s fascination with mass-production and the culture of advertisement. Created six years after Warhol’s original paintings of the soups, the portfolio draws directly from his most groundbreaking work. The series is amongst his most valuable portfolios of all time.

In 1962, Andy shocked the public with his original soup can paintings, 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, which debuted at the Ferus gallery in Los Angeles. It was his first solo exhibit, and the work’s objectivity and purely commercial subject matter surprised the audience. At the time, abstraction and emotional style dominated the art world. Consequently, Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans were met with varying reviews. Many artists and critics were off-put by the cold hard style, and felt the work lacked typical painterly details and emotional depth. Decades later, the paintings remain some of the most significant images in the history of modern art.

As a pioneer of the Pop Art movement, Warhol elevated familiar objects and images to celebrity status. He famously said “I don’t think art should be only for the select few. I think it should be for the mass of the American people.” Warhol had a particular interest in commerce and mass-produced products. This can be seen later in his Ads series, for example. For Warhol, what most people see as mundane objects are actually a rich source of inspiration and beauty. Mainly, he saw ordinary commercial products like Coca-Cola, Life Savers, and Campbell’s Soup Cans as fascinating products of human achievement. No matter where you go, they remain the same. No one can buy a better Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup than you. And nothing can make your Coke better than anyone else’s.

When it comes to works like Campbell’s Soup Cans I: Cream of Mushroom, it is likely that people will always debate the artistic value in Warhol’s art, just as they did in 1962. However, the impact he made on the culture of art is undeniable. With the soup cans, Warhol sought to challenge common perceptions of art and rethink the concept of artistic value. Specifically, the work deviated from historically accepted artistic subject matter. For Warhol, these subjects were outdated, and focusing on them meant ignoring the splendor of the current historical moment. Instead, he asked what was really authentic and important to the present culture. He saw things like mass-production, factories, and the fruits of industrial society as the most direct reflection of contemporary human life. Ubiquitous objects were not boring to him, but famous, just like celebrities.

As a result, Warhol’s work offers a new interpretation of the everyday objects that surround us, and a refreshing view of art itself. Thus, Campbell’s Soup Cans I: Cream of Mushroom 53 and similar works are conceptual hallmarks of modern art, and allow us to rethink the boundaries of artistic legitimacy.

CAMPBELL’S SOUP II: SCOTCH BROTH 55

Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup II: Scotch Broth 55 is one of ten prints from his Campbell’s Soup IIportfolio, which follows his first portfolio of Campbell’s Soup can imagery. In this collection, Warhol takes the ever-present American pantry staple and transforms it into high art simply by exactly mimicking the cans’ label. The second portfolio contains ten of the more unusual flavors from the original 32 that Warhol created in 1962, which were all real flavors of Campbell’s Soup cans. These ten prints are slightly more unique than those in the first print portfolio because of the more unusual flavors and added graphics on their labels, which make them visually stand out.

CAMPBELL’S SOUP II: SCOTCH BROTH 55 AS PART OF ANDY WARHOL’S LARGER BODY OF WORK

Warhol’s collection of prints representing Campbell’s Soup cans is arguably his most iconic and widely recognized series of artwork. The Campbell’s Soup portfolios represent many themes that Warhol continues to work with throughout his career, including the powerful role that mass consumption plays on postwar society. The semi-mechanized process he used to create his works is something that is characterized with Warhol. His Campbell’s Soup series helped to usher in the Pop Art movement that endures today, renewed and rediscovered by artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Chicken ‘N Dumplings 58 by Andy Warhol is a print included in the artist’s Campbell’s Soup Cans II series from 1969. These prints debuted shortly after his first soup can series from 1968, and seven years after his original Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings from 1962. Warhol’s signature Pop Art soup cans shocked the art world. The work exhibits his signature design techniques and philosophies concerning consumerism, advertising, and mechanical production. The Campbell’s Soup Cans I and II portfolios are some of Andy Warhol’s most valuable print series of all time.

This new collection of prints showcased the same traditional Campbell’s Soup design, but with the addition of new graphics. Although the series still contains the same bold red and white artwork, Campbell’s Soup Cans II showcases ten additional Campbell’s flavors, highlighting the less common soups the brand created. The added illustrations make this series the most developed form of Warhol’s soup can concept.

Instead of the traditional Campbell’s golden seal, each can shows unique labels. The Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Chicken ‘N Dumplings 58 shows a banner which reads “Stout Hearted Soup” held up by two Queen’s Guard soldiers. This new design fits into the greater series of soup cans by adding a small flare, while staying true to the repetitive appearance that Warhol wanted to achieve.

At first, Warhol hand painted the cans for his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans piece in 1962. But the adoption of the silkscreen technique revolutionized his work, which he loved for its precise and reliable results; he could now mass produce detailed images in a more convenient way. By using this new technique, Warhol could fulfill his dream of “becoming a machine.”

Works like Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Chicken ‘N Dumplings comprise some of the most iconic pop art images of the century, serving as symbols of the entire genre. In the series, Warhol employs the Pop Art technique by alienating mundane objects from their original context, and transforming them into works of fine art. These Campbell’s Soup Cans challenged what could be deemed socially and artistically acceptable by suggesting an alternative source of artistic value: simple commodities. Not only did consumer products fascinate Andy, he also expressed his personal connection to the company: “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess. The same thing over and over again.”

Warhol’s love for mass production, advertisement and Campbell’s soup all combined to create works like Chicken ‘N Dumplings. Although the Campbell’s soup cans are some of his most notable prints, showcasing the original 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans was a risky move. Due to the overwhelmingly familiar commercial subject, many people questioned the merit of his soup cans. Decades later, however, they are among some of the most important works of modern art, and remain the subject of academic and artistic discourse.

Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Chicken ‘N Dumplings 58 has become an iconic piece of the Pop Art genre, and the history of modern art as a whole. With his Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol’s succeeded in breaking the mold of fine art, introducing a truly unique and original concept to the art world.

CAMPBELLS SOUP II: HOT DOG AND BEAN 59

Warhol’s Hot Dog Bean 59 is a part of his Campbell’s Soup Cans II portfolio. Created in 1969 and seven years after his first Campbell’s Soup Cans series, Hot Dog Bean 59 is one of ten screenprints in the portfolio. The screenprints are characterized by the realistic depiction of a soup can, in this case “Hot Dog Bean 59” soup, and the likeness of the Campbell’s logo. The decision to create this series twice was based on the well-known soup notoriety. Warhol was interested in what made people and things famous and well-liked. This ties further into his propensity for consumerism and the beginning of his artistic career as an advertising illustrator. In creating his soup cans, Warhol was able to transform an everyday commodity into a valuable work of art. The genius behind this is that Warhol was able to make a can of soup, that would cost less than a dollar at the time, and add hundreds, thousands and millions of dollars to its value through the artistic process of one part aestheticism and another part ingenuity.

CAMPBELLS SOUP II: HOT DOG BEAN 59 AS PART OF ANDY WARHOL’S LARGER BODY OF WORK

The soup cans were a legitimate subject as a modern “still life” during the postwar American economy. First shown at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, the exhibit started as a series of paintings and established Warhol’s first solo exhibition as an overnight success. A major inspiration through out Andy Warhol’s career was the power of the image. His fascination of how the representative overtook reality was the source for countless works, including the Campbell’s Soup Cans portfolio. Some of the most famous and recognizable images in art history, the Soup Cans by Andy Warhol helped to usher in the Pop Art movement that endures today, renewed and rediscovered by artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Oyster Stew 60 by Andy Warhol is one of ten prints included in his second Campbell’s Soup Cans portfolio, published in 1969. This print is part of a continuation of Campbell’s Soup Cans I from 1968. Published seven years after his original 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings, this new portfolio focused on more uncommon flavors, each of which has their own unique labels. With their revolutionary design and conceptual style, Warhol’s pop-art style soup cans took the art world by storm. The bold images initially shocked artists and critics when Andy debuted them at his first solo exhibition. Many people saw the work as grossly appropriative. However, the exhibition was an ultimate success, as many people liked his work and the controversy helped him gain traction. Through the mixed reviews, they remain as some of the most provocative pieces of modern art history.

To create his own brand of Pop-art, Warhol appropriated well known objects of consumer culture and transformed them fine art. Warhol took the simple design and blew it up to a 35×32 inch print, with its flat and bold composition. The work indicates Warhol’s early style, in which he would often tempt audiences to question common notions of artistic value. The Campbell’s Soup Cans challenged what could be deemed socially and artistically acceptable, ultimately changing the trajectory of art history.

Warhol’s prints like Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Oyster Stew are ultimately is one of the most iconic images of modern art, which Warhol used to convey his thoughts on the world of consumerism and advertisement. Warhol created similar works by appropriating images of household products such as Coca-Cola and Brillo Boxes. Warhol’s use of repetition adds to the advertisement style, resembling the look of billboards and the spirit of mass-production.

In Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans I series, he produced exact replicas of Campbell’s product. This series is a bit different. Instead of the tradition Campbell’s seal, Warhol illustrated unique designs for each flavor. In Oyster Stew 60, a banner wraps around the golden seal, reading, “Important! Add whole milk”, and “WITH GRADE AA BUTTER”. Other works from this series include New England Clam Chowder 57, Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s 61, Cheddar Cheese 63, and Vegetarian Vegetable 56. These unusual soups of Campbell’s Soup II are all real flavors of Campbell’s Soup.

Not only did consumerism and mass-production fascinate Andy, but he also expressed his personal connection to Campbell’s. “I used to drink it [Campbell’s Soup], I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again”. Some people say Warhol painted the soups simply because he liked the way they tasted. Others believe the work exhibits great conceptual depth, and Warhol’s experimentation with the context of art.

Warhol’s love for mass-production, advertisement and Campbell’s soup all morphed together to create these portfolios. Although the Campbell’s soup cans are arguably some of his most notable works, the artist received some backlash after showcasing his original 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans series. Due to the unfamiliar subject matter of Warhol’s Soup Cans, some people questioned the significance of his work. Fifty-nine years after their debut, people still may debate the value of Warhol’s soup cans.

Thus, the humble images are amongst the most profound works of modern art. Along with works like Marilyn Monroe, the soups allowed Warhol to scale the heights of the pop-art movement, and cemented his legacy as the pop-art king. Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Oyster Stew 60 soon became a quintessential item of pop-art culture. Warhol published his soups at the dawn of the new art movement, helping to launch the genre to the mainstream. Still to this day, Warhol’s soup cans rule the pop-art world.

Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s by Andy Warhol is a print from the Campbell’s Soup CansII portfolio. Warhol published this series one year after Cambpell’s Soup I, and six years after his original 32 Campbell’s Soups. Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s 61 is one of ten prints included in Warhol’s 1969 portfolio, each containing different flavors and names. Warhol’s signature pop-art style soup cans took the art world by storm, with his revolutionary design techniques and conceptual depth.

Not only did this new series contain a different array of flavors, but the labels also have additional illustrations. This new collection of soup can prints has the same design Americans know and love, but with the bonus of new graphics. In place of the traditional Campbell’s golden seal, the front of the can shows unique designs for each flavor. This particular print shows “Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s” written in a funky red and yellow font. This mundane, yet fun design of these soup can prints fit well into Warhol’s already existing portfolios, marking a development from his original soup can paintings.

Other works from this series include New England Clam Chowder 57, Hot Dog Bean 59, Chicken N’ Dumplings 58 and Vegetarian Vegetable 56. These unusual soups Warhol included in his second series are all real flavors of Campbell’s Soup. Each soup can which Warhol created for this second portfolio has its own unique label illustrations.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans II prints are some of the most iconic pop art images of the century, serving as a grande symbol of consumer culture. To create this famous design, Warhol appropriated well known objects and images of consumerism by turning them into fine art. His soup cans challenged what could be deemed socially and artistically acceptable. Not only did Andy have a clear fascination with consumer culture and its products, he also expressed his personal connection to the company. “I used to drink it [Campbell’s Soup]. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”

In 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Warhol, landing him in the hospital where vascular surgeon Giuseppe Rossi was on duty. Dr. Rossi performed a five-and-a-half-hour-long procedure on Warhol, repairing the damage done to the his body. Hours later, he successfully revived Warhol, saving the life of the famous artist. In an effort to repay him for his heroic work, Andy Warhol sent Dr. Rossi a selection of his prints. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s is one of the many prints that was gifted to the doctor. This one of a kind print with a unique history has been acquired by Revolver Gallery.

Warhol’s love for mass-production, advertisement, and Campbell’s soup cans all morphed together to create these portfolios. Although the Campbell’s soup cans are arguably some of his most notable works, the artist received some backlash after showcasing his original 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans series. Due to the unfamiliar subject matter of Warhol’s soup cans, some people questioned the significance of his work. Fifty-nine years after their original debut, people still may debate the artistic merit of the soup cans. Nonetheless, they quickly became some of the most treasured works of modern art.

Despite some of the initial criticism Warhol received after showing his Campbell’s Soup cans, the bold design launched his career after his first exhibition in 1962. Seven years later, works like Campbell’s Soup Cans II: Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s became a quintessential item of pop-art culture. Warhol created his original design for these soup cans just as the Pop Art movement emerged. His groundbreaking and bold work allowed the pop-art genre to enter the world of mainstream art. Still to this day, Warhol’s soup cans rule the pop-art world, with their bold design and revolutionary subject matter.

The Cow series, which Warhol worked on from 1966 to 1976, subverted expectations. However, it wasn’t the Pop artist’s first time using an uncanny subject. Through soup cans, passenger tickets and electric chairs, Warhol expressed a desire to shake up the art world. In addition, his Flowers series displayed the wide range of his capabilities. If flowers could be Pop, why not cows? Still, the art world associated Warhol’s work with star power and commercialism rather than the natural world. He composed Cow 11, one of five prints in the series, during the final days of the Whitney Museum's Warhol exhibition in 1971.

In the early 1960’s, Warhol and his close friend Ted Carey visited the Leo Castelli Gallery. There the pair met art dealer Ivan Karp. After introducing them to one of Roy Lichenstein’s paintings, Karp agreed to come by Warhol’s apartment to see his work. He loved Warhol’s straightforward pieces while Warhol appreciated Karp’s laid-back style of art dealing. “I had a very good rapport with Ivan right away,” Warhol said. “He was young, he had an ‘up’ attitude to everything.” Karp later inspired Warhol's Cow series.

Warhol often asked his friends what he should paint to get an outside perspective. Karp suggested cows, calling the subject a “wonderfully pastoral...durable image in the history of the arts.” Warhol accepted the suggestion, but not without putting his own spin on the idea. “I don’t know how ‘pastoral’ [Ivan] expected me to make them,” Warhol quipped, “but when he saw the huge cow heads—bright pink on a bright yellow background...he was shocked.” Highly committed to his focus on repetition and production, Warhol even printed the image on wallpaper. In one of his gallery shows, he papered the walls with the cows.

“They’re super-pastoral!” Karp exclaimed after he gathered himself. “They’re ridiculous! They’re blazingly bright and vulgar!” Like the print he saw that day, Cow 11 radiated fluorescent pink and yellow to startle the viewer. Warhol’s printer Gerard Malanga took the up-close shot of the cow turned towards the camera. What may have been a conventional image, Warhol made unconventional. His use of vivid color made Cow 11 as recognizable as any print in his Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s Soup series. Further, for Warhol, cows were just as fascinating as celebrities or commodities on a shelf.

By and large, Cow 11 is a testament to Warhol’s talent for doing the unexpected. His creations surprised viewers, encouraging them to see something familiar from a new perspective. Like in his Flowers collection, Warhol selected an image from nature and gave it commercial appeal. The Cow series could be printed on wallpaper over and over again without ever being boring.

Warhol's Cows were printed in New York by Bill Miller's Wallpaper Studio, Inc.

Cow 12A is a screenprint on wallpaper by Andy Warhol from 1976. Before the Cow series, Warhol’s oeuvre primarily focused on subjects clearly tied to consumerism or celebrity culture. In the mid-1960’s, legendary art dealer Ivan Karp suggested that Andy Warhol experiment with recognizable but more universal subjects. He suggested Warhol depict cows, noting that they were “wonderfully pastoral” and, “such a durable image in the history of the arts.”

Here, Warhol uses the pop-culture aesthetic to depict a long-standing subject of art history. He demonstrates that Pop-Art is unique not only for its subjects, but for the style in which they are depicted. In the end, the manner of presenting subjects becomes an equally compelling component of the movement. Cow 12A is the last image in this series, which represented a turn for Warhol’s movement. Though Warhol is most well known for his depictions of commodified subjects, the Cow portfolio is an example of Warhol commodifying a universally recognizable subject by the way in which it is represented.

Warhol’s choice to depict an image universal to the “history of the arts” separates this portfolio from much of his other work. The Cow thus stands out from his works that generated controversy for their depiction of nontraditional subjects like soup cans or Coca-Cola. But, even as the subject changes, Warhol’s trademark style does not. Using electric backgrounds and bold contrasts, Cow 12A pops as much as any of Warhol’s renowned celebrity portraits. The result is the absorption of a non-market symbol into the Pop Art canon. Such an absorption proves that Warhol’s philosophy goes beyond traditionally recognized subjects of consumerism.

The Cow portfolio, by depicting a universal subject, succeeds in making Warhol’s style universal. The Cow needn’t be a brand, a celebrity, or a mascot. Once subjected to the Warhol Factory treatment, it becomes a part of Warhol’s entrepreneurial art oeuvre. Thus, Warhol produces a commodity out of anything art could conceivably depict.

The Cow portfolio also demonstrates a new chapter for Warhol in that it was his first wallpaper project. These would eventually become an indispensable part of his work, as he would hang wallpapers for most of his shows. When guests attended the first show lined with Cow wallpaper, the first thing they saw was a brightly-colored cow against an eye-popping background.

The loud contrasts that define Warhol’s work usually utilize complimentary colors, but Cow 12A creates the Pop-Art effect by making both the foreground and background bright and aggressive colors. The result is that the print feels playful, even chaotic, without a stark juxtaposition between the foreground and the background. The feeling of the print, ultimately, is engaging and humorous. Cow 12A seems to give the viewer the impression of a cow on an acid trip.

Warhol’s Cows were printed by Bill Miller’s Wallpaper Studio, Inc., in New York.

Andy Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians complete portfolio explores our imagination of the American West. I was printed in 1986 by Rupert Jasen Smith in New York. In this series, Warhol presents themes of American exceptionalism and the romanticism of the country’s history. The complete series is included in Warhol’s top 10 most valuable portfolios of all time.

Warhol interspersed recognizable portraits of well-known American “heroes”–John Wayne, Annie Oakley, Teddy Roosevelt, and General George Custer–with less familiar Native American images and motifs to present a commentary on the American mythology of the historic West. Rather than portraying Native Americans within their historical landscape or Cowboys in their veritable forms, Warhol chose to portray a popular, romanticized version of the American West. The West that he chose to represent is familiar to everyone and can be seen in novels, films, TV series. Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians suite serves as an ahistorical representation that mirrors a popular interpretation of the past. Warhol addresses similar themes of American exceptionalism and romanticism in his other works, such as his Ads and Myths portfolios.

Included in this portfolio are FS II.373-386: John Wayne, Annie Oakley, General Custer, Northwest Coast Mask, Kachina Dolls, Indian Shield, Mother and Child, Geronimo, Indian Head Nickel and Teddy Roosevelt.

John Wayne 377 (Unique) by Andy Warhol represents the macho leading man in Hollywood’s prime. He was a fixture in westerns and war movies alike and was considered an all-American hero. The source image is a publicity photo from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In this image, the celebrity status of John Wayne completely overshadows the actor’s real identity. In the movie, a reporter takes the story of John Wayne’s character back to his editor and is told, “This is the West, sir; when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s what Warhol did in this series.

John Wayne (Unique) 377 by Andy Warhol as Part of his Larger Body of Work
In Cowboys and Indians, Warhol interspersed recognizable portraits of well-known American heroes with less familiar Native American images and motifs. It demonstrates his ironic commentary on America’s collective mythologizing of the historic West. Rather than portraying Native Americans within their historical landscape, Warhol chose to portray a romanticized version of the American West. The West that he chose to represent is familiar to everyone and can be seen in novels, films, and television series. Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians suite is an ahistorical representation that mirrors a popular interpretation of the American West.

John Wayne 377 (Unique) by Andy Warhol represents the macho leading man in Hollywood’s prime. He was a fixture in westerns and war movies alike and was considered an all-American hero. The source image is a publicity photo from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In this image, the celebrity status of John Wayne completely overshadows the actor’s real identity. In the movie, a reporter takes the story of John Wayne’s character back to his editor and is told, “This is the West, sir; when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s what Warhol did in this series.

John Wayne (Unique) 377 by Andy Warhol as Part of his Larger Body of Work
In Cowboys and Indians, Warhol interspersed recognizable portraits of well-known American heroes with less familiar Native American images and motifs. It demonstrates his ironic commentary on America’s collective mythologizing of the historic West. Rather than portraying Native Americans within their historical landscape, Warhol chose to portray a romanticized version of the American West. The West that he chose to represent is familiar to everyone and can be seen in novels, films, and television series. Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians suite is an ahistorical representation that mirrors a popular interpretation of the American West.

This version of Andy Warhol’s General Custer print is a trial proof from Andy Warhol’s 1986 Cowboys and Indians series. The portfolio explores the relationship between the media’s romanticized take on the Old American West and it’s duplicitous effect on correctly understanding history. The portfolio features America’s favorite legends of the Old American West like Annie Oakley and John Wayne; political and wartime figures like Custer; and significant Native American heroes including Sitting Bull. Cowboys and Indians was part of a fecundity of portfolios created by Warhol that year, but this one emerged as one of the most distinguished (and valuable) he ever created.

General Custer, notorious as the “top Indian fighter”, was a commander of the Union Army during the American Civil War and fought against Indigenous Americans during the American Indian Wars. He died at The Battle of the Little BigHorn at the hand of Sioux leader Sitting Bull and his Plains Indians army. In the 19th century and most of the 20th century, General Custer received fantastic public relations. Well received when he was alive, his death transformed him into even more of a mythicized American hero. His wife wrote memoirs of his charitable deeds such as Boots and Saddles, and breweries like Anheuser-Busch used the famous painting “Custer’s Last Stand” in their advertising campaign. But by the late 20th century, his fraudulent morals and war tactics lost him credibility by most accounts.

General Custer is based on an original black and white image circa 1865, the last year of the Civil War. He dons the trademark Union general uniform with a hat and scarf. The crisp and lightly creased blouse is adorned with yellow embellishments of his rank. Overall, it is simple, regal, and contrasts the naturalist clothing of the Native Americans in the series. His mustache and beard accentuate a strong chin.

Warhol had always been obsessed with the Old American West. He even made two of his own Western films. Then again, much of America was obsessed with the genre. The Western represented exciting ways of showing patriotism, and it’s protagonists had an unwavering devotion to their country.

According to Southwest Contemporary, Phillip French, author of Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre, believes that Westerns have “three cardinal aspects” which stylize the genre. These include the oversimplification of complex issues into clearcut “good vs evil,” practicing cinematic “virtuosity” through reshaping conventional norms, and misdating aspects of the supposed time period. All this is to say that while Westerns were loved, they were not mimetic of history. To be successful in Hollywood, they needed to show exceptional drama and simplicity.

General Custer (like the other figures and objects in the series) visually takes inspiration from this traditional Western plot. By separating the person with place in General Custer 379, Warhol removes vital historical integrity. Through the beautiful vibrant colors and fine details, however, Warhol’s pop art style keeps a level of coherence about the figures while adding stylistic drama to engage viewers. Antagonizing forces are shown together in Cowboys and Indians, specifically Custer and Sitting Bull, making blatant commentary about the misperceived truth of either individual’s life history, but our continued fascination by both.

Though Warhol never claimed his support for either the politicians or heroes of the Old West, or the Native Americans, he included both (who’ve been subject to different opinions throughout history), to show their historical importance, as well as the way they exist in the American imagination. The series is controversial, thought provoking, and remains one of Warhol’s greatest series.

Sitting Bull is part of Andy Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians series. The print is based on an archival photo of the Sioux Chief. His stoic pose and placid facial expression makes it seem that he is posing for a photograph, rather than an image of him in action hunting or in combat. The vivid coloring of Sitting Bull’s face and the light highlights that outline his shape give the traditional subject a modern twist.

Warhol returns to portraiture in this homage to the hero of the Battle of Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull. Originally conceived as part of the portfolio, Cowboys and Indians, the first series to combine images of people and objects, Sitting Bull was not included in the last minute and replaced with another subject. The choice of Sitting Bull as a subject for the series is bold, as the image is rivaled with that of General Custer. General Custer was one of the leaders of the south during the Civil War, and he was notably met by Sitting Bull in an armed battle for Native American territory. Custer was ultimately unsuccessful, and the battle is also known as “Custer’s Last Stand.”

Plains Indian Shield 382 by Andy Warhol is one of ten screenprints in his Cowboys and Indians Complete Portfolio. An additional four trial proofs were excluded from the final suite: War Bonnet Indian 373, Buffalo Nickel 374, Action Picture 375, and Sitting Bull 376 or A70.

As a child of the 1930s and 40s, Warhol grew up in the era of Western stars such as the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and John Wayne. In his youth, he was fascinated by the romance of the West created by the movies; in adulthood, he remained intrigued by the genre, and Western aesthetics influenced much of his artwork. Aside from the Cowboys and Indians portfolio, Warhol demonstrated his enduring interest in Americana themes with his Myths Complete Portfolio, his Elvis Presley paintings, and in films like Horse (1965), and Lonesome Cowboys (1968).

In the Cowboys and Indians portfolio, Warhol illustrates the clash between settlers and Native Americans with five prints representing the “Cowboys” and five representing the “Indians.” The symmetry of the portfolio presents the West as a setting of conflict and positions each print as an opponent. Warhol presents, in short, a theatrical version of the West; he has little interest in creating a historically accurate representation of the frontier days. Instead, Warhol attempts to mirror our imaginations of the West found in popular culture and media.

In Plains Indian Shield 382, Warhol depicts his own version of a traditional Native American shield. These shields were common among Great Plains tribes. Typically, indigenous groups made the shields from buffalo hides stretched over handmade wooden hoops. They were often adorned with feathers and illustrated with paintings of animals and geometric shapes. The shields served both practical and spiritual purposes.

Warhol visited New York City’s National Museum of the American Indian to photograph Native American artifacts for the Native-inspired prints in the Cowboys and Indians portfolio. These photographs were the basis of the Plains Indian Shield, the Northwest Coast Mask , and the Kachina Dolls.

In Plains Indian Shield 382, Warhol sketches the shield in a muted pop color palette of mustard, teal, and orange. He outlines the details in both black and white, giving the print a three-dimensional quality. His shield design features two buffalos facing each other with their heads meeting in the center of the circle. There is also an illustration of a bright orange feather hanging off of the shield.

With Plains Indian Shield 382, Warhol portrays a symbol of Native American culture in the style of the commercialized version of the West. Warhol contrasts the authentic and cinematic, and as a result, provides a striking look at the portrayal of Native American culture in popular media.

Mother and Child 383 by Andy Warhol is a screen print portrait depicting an anonymous Native American mother with her child asleep against her back. Mother and Child 383 is part of Warhol’s 10-piece Cowboys and Indians portfolio, representing figures and objects related to the Wild West. Cowboys and Indians explores a romanticized “Old American West” through fragmented depictions of Native Americans, Cowboys, and heroes of the American Frontier.

Mother and Child 383 portrays an indigenous mother with her child innocently asleep on her back, cheek resting against the crux of her neck. Their amaranth skin pops against the stark white background; the fabrics of their clothes also stand out while maintaining an earthy and naturalistic style; Warhol accents semi-precious turquoise and cherry red fabric with sketched outlines of yellow and patches of blue. The red and blue also add a reflective highlight on the family’s jet black hair, but it comes from a nonexistent light source. What appears to be a white earring and necklace defines the mother’s square chiseled jawline while whites brighten the topmost layer of her fabric. Overall the image appears pixelated, inciting a potential association between the indigenous family and the media’s warped interpretation of their identity.

Warhol perfects texture in Mother and Child 383. Black shading defines the different layers of intricately woven and fringed fabrics. It adds incredible depth that is sometimes minimal in Warhol’s other portraits.

Andy Warhol always loved Westerns since childhood. Devising enough money, he would watch Old Western films at the cinema and eventually directed two of them himself. He was in the majority with many Americans, who loved how Westerns provided gun slinging excitement and patriotism for the country. This portfolio is yet another one of his tributes to the Old West and its role in pop culture, though unlike the formulaic storyline of Western films, he explores common interpretations of this side of American history.

Mother and Child 383 is vague and purposefully so. Without a contextual background, Mother and Child 383 identifies a partial abstraction of their history by modern mass media and pop culture. This gap was often filled with Western bias and a romanticized nationalist influence, which other works in the series—like General Custer 379 and Teddy Roosevelt 386—embody. They are supposed heroes of the Old West, though they had known hostility against Native Americans. Warhol’s succinct but loving depiction between the Indigenous mother and child further comments on an incongruous viewpoint of America’s past.

Warhol claimed that series such as Cowboys and Indians were done with emotional neutrality. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” People may disagree with this blaise overtone, but Warhol’s self-commentary was never that straightforward.

Mother and Child 383 is one of the most profound works in Cowboys and Indians. With it’s anonymity, fragmentation from person and place, and textural nuances, Warhol illuminates the impacts of pop culture on our interpretation of historical events. Overall, the series is a masterful display of Warhol’s use of Pop Art to decontextualize images and symbols, effectively presenting them in a way that confronts the audience with their own preconceived notions of such subjects.

Geronimo 384 is a screenprint from the Cowboys and Indians series. In this series, Warhol explores the Old West as an All-American collective history. Warhol’s work creates a commentary on mass media and the way in which contrived imagery can affect how we understand our history. Images of Geronimo, Annie Oakley and Mother and Child are based on characters in the Hollywood adaptation of our history and do not truly represent the roles that these real individuals historically played.

Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign painting from 1981 was the ultimate manifestation of his love affair with money. Warhol once said, “I like money on the wall,” and the Dollar Signs was his way of using his iconic imagery to achieve just that. Though Andy Warhol is known for his screenprints, he made a number of paintings throughout his career. His paintings are particularly valuable because they are completely unique, and he made so few in comparison with his multitude of screenprints. Interestingly, his paintings are almost identical to his screenprints, other than their medium, because he used the same screens for both processes.

DOLLAR SIGN PAINTING AS PART OF ANDY WARHOL’S LARGER BODY OF WORK
The Dollar Sign series from 1982 was the ultimate manifestation of Andy Warhol’s love affair with money. Warhol once said, “I like money on the wall,” and the series was his way of using his iconic imagery to achieve just that. The Dollar Sign paintings contain a source image that was created by Warhol himself which was an uncommon practice for Warhol, setting it apart from the rest of his body of work. The Dollar Sign series is a superb example of Warhol seizing a internationally recognizable symbol and altering it into something that was purely Warholian.

Dollar Sign 274 is a one of six screenprints from Andy Warhol‘s 1982 series titled Dollar Sign, or “$”. Other prints in the series include the dollar sign in various colorations, like Dollar Sign 279 and 280. Other iterations of the Dollar Sign schema can be seen in Dollar Sign (Quadrant) and Dollar Sign (9), completed in the same year.

Andy Warhol loved money, and he reveled in painting the things he loved. In a way, the dollar sign symbol was a fated subject for the Pop artist to undertake. “I like money on the wall,” Warhol commented in his 1975 book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you the first thing they would see is money on the wall.” The dollar sign symbol is a Pop image through and through. In Dollar Sign 274, Warhol places capitalism at the forefront of modern art, observing how intertwined the two worlds are.

Dollar Sign 274 displays the subject in complementary colors, the dark symbol dusted with weathered texture and a deep red scrawl. Warhol created the symbol himself rather than using a photograph, which was a rare choice for him. As with many of the works in this portfolio, Dollar Sign 274 underscores its man-made components. Whether through scribbled sketches or painted signage, Warhol insinuates that the idea of money is an American commodity itself. In fact, the work implies that human hands are in constant contact with commerce in some shape or form. No matter if we are buying or selling, designing advertisements or glancing at them, we are always interacting with consumer culture.

The Pop Art movement shattered the barrier between high and low art. As Warhol said, “the Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” Pop Art was also about leaving things as they were, presenting them the way they existed in the real world. Consumer culture and currency were not often the subjects of modern art. Warhol made a momentous statement, then, by placing dollar signs on canvas. Something so significant to our culture deserved its place in art. Money reigned supreme in its sway over culture, and Warhol was not afraid to voice the truth. In addition, the world and its functions had changed. It was no longer based in agriculture, but industry and manufacturing.

Warhol saw a modern society before him, one dominated by the repetition of factory production and the almighty dollar. He wanted to portray the immensity and singularity of consumerism because that was what he saw around him. From the time he first began doing commercial art, he took notice of the way people interacted with products and advertisements. Americans loved to spend money and Warhol didn’t consider himself above consumer culture. He was an active part of it and often said he loved shopping himself, especially on Saturdays.

Dollar Sign 274 represents a subject Warhol loved most. Through placing the dollar sign front and center, he emboldens the viewer to confront its inescapable relation to both the art world and our daily lives.

Dollar Sign 278 is a screenprint by Andy Warhol. Composed in 1982 as part of his Dollar Sign portfolio, Dollar Sign 278 encapsulates the essence of the series: a bold and conspicuous celebration of Warhol’s fascination with money. This series of prints has an unusually intimate style, containing a rarely hand-made source image and frenzied coloring. This choice suggests that there is more to the seemingly impersonal symbol than one might think.

Andy Warhol made no secret of his fascination with business, capitalism, and money. The Pop-Art movement he pioneered celebrated consumerism in its depictions of consumer goods and in its advertisement-inspired depictions of celebrities. He famously dubbed his studio “the Factory,” a name which accurately described the assembly-line style production that took place there. The subject matter and manufactory production of Warhol’s work blurred the lines between art and product. Further, Warhol himself was vocal about his belief that his art was a kind of business.

Warhol’s obsession with financial success may have been a result of his upbringing. Raised in Depression-Era Pittsburgh, Warhol understood the absence of luxury, and even money itself. For the Warhola family, making money was necessary for survival. We see this sentiment reflected in Warhol’s reverence for entrepreneurship. “Good business is the best art,” he said, famously, in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. This philosophy was certainly present in his mass-production of art, in which he created and sold prints at high volumes. Moreover, it is notably present in what Warhol chose to depict. The universally recognizable Campbell’s Soup series presents commodities themselves as art, and argues that there is art in consumerism and consumption.

The Dollar Sign portfolio takes this a step further. While earlier Warhol masterpieces celebrated the commodity as art, Dollar Sign celebrates the dollar, itself, as art. This echoes Andy Warhol’s idea of “money on the wall,” perhaps best summed up in this quote from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall”. In Warhol’s extreme celebration of consumerism, money has the same artistic meaning as anything it could purchase.

Andy Warhol chose to color the symbol green, unmistakable recognizable as the color of money. Thus, this print one of the most upfront and eye-catching in the portfolio. Stripped-down to the most provocative and recognizable motifs, Dollar Sign 278 perfectly captures the honesty and the starkness of Warhol in his later years.

Title: Pine Barrens Tree Frog 294
Medium: Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board.
Year: 1983
Size: 38″ x 38″
Edition: Edition of 150, signed and numbered in pencil. Portfolio of 10.

Andy Warhol created Pine Barrens Tree Frog 294 for his Endangered Species portfolio. The tree frog was listed as endangered from 1977-1983 and can only be found in three distinct areas in the Eastern United States. In 1983, Warhol was commissioned to create a portfolio of ten animals to raise awareness of endangered species by Ron and Freyda Feldman. Ron and Freyda were very active philanthropists. Also featured in this series are the San Francisco Silverspot, the Giant Panda, African Elephant and Grevy’s Zebra. In this print, Warhol created a larger than life image of the tiny tree frog that made this animal a pop art icon. The dark background is contrasted by the bright primary colors and clean white lines used to highlight the frog. This portfolio is widely sought after by collectors because of the use of bold colors by Andy Warhol, who fondly referred to this portfolio as his “animals in makeup.”

Warhol created his Endangered Species portfolio of ten, brightly colored screenprints in 1983. He was commissioned by his friends Ron and Freyda Feldman to create the portfolio to raise awareness. Both Ron and Freyda were dedicated philanthropists and political activists. True to his pop art style, Warhol printed the animals in bright, vibrant colors. He fondly referred to them as his “animals in make up.”

Andy Warhol’s San Francisco Silverspot 298 is a print from Warhol’s Endangered Species series from 1983. The title is most likely a reference to the callippe silverspot, a subspecies of butterfly indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Area, from which it obviously gets its name, and named so to differentiate it from related butterfly populations in the Pacific Northwest and Nevada regions. While multiple previous attempts had been made from as early as 1978 to change its status, this particular subspecies wasn’t officially classified as endangered by the federal government until 1997. As such, it is the only insect featured among Warhol’s Endangered Species, making it something of a special consideration. Warhol had shown an affinity for butterflies before, creating Happy Butterfly Day, an ink-blotted multicolored collage of the winged creatures as part of his commercial advertising work dating from 1954.

Right away, San Francisco Silverspot 298 is evocative of another iconic Warhol series, namely Flowers. Instead of poppy five-petaled flowers set against a grassy background, however, the silverspot now sits there. And instead of verdant blades of grass, Warhol instead overexposes them, bordering on white, alongside the deep blue shadows they create. The butterfly retains this blue as well, having it mostly cover its thorax, abdomen, and the proximal parts of its wings. The rest of its wings show an even brighter white than the grass blades, while having that white encroached upon by touches of lime green, red, and yellow. Like others in the series, the butterfly is outlined in hand-drawn lines. Two sets of lines seem to be in play within this piece, one white and one brownish orange, sometimes working with each other and sometimes opposing. This may most noticeably be seen with the butterfly’s antennae. The butterfly seems somewhat detached in the foreground, somehow floating above the grass and captured statically mid-flight at the same time.

San Francisco Silverspot 298 is a masterpiece that is certainly indicative of Warhol’s work in the 1980s, when he reached the summit of his artistic skills. The Endangered Species portfolio is a favorite amongst Warhol collectors, and has become especially cherished in recent years. Other works from this series include Siberian Tiger, and Black Rhinoceros.

ORANGUTAN 299

The Orangutan is native to Asian countries Indonesia and Malaysia, but due to the expansion of civilization and negative environmental factors, today they are only found in Borneo and Sumatra. The species is divided up into two, Bornean and Sumatran, based on their current habitats. Both continue to be listed as endangered, with the Sumatran orangutan categorized as critically endangered. They are extremely intelligent primates, which has provoked many humans to take them as pets, contributing to their fragile placement in the ecosystem.

ORANGUTAN 299 AS PART OF ANDY WARHOL’S LARGER BODY OF WORK

In 1983 Warhol was commissioned by his friend and publisher Ron Feldman and his wife Freyda to create the series of 10 endangered species. Both Freyda and Ronald were celebrated political activists who were very active philanthropists. In 1983, they asked Warhol to create a portfolio of ten endangered species to raise environmental consciousness. Warhol fondly referred to this series as his “animals in makeup,” given the bold pop colors he uses to portray the animals as large than life.The inspiration behind this series was to rise consciousness of environmental issues. Warhol fondly referred to this series as his “animals in makeup,” given the bold pop colors he uses to portray the animals as large than life.

Grevy’s Zebra 300 by Andy Warhol is one of ten pieces from his Endangered Species portfolio, which premiered in 1983. Warhol was commissioned by environmentalists and gallerists Ronald and Frayda Feldman to depict 10 endangered animals, bringing attention to their fragility. The US federal government had passed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973, making clear criteria for assigning the status of “endangered” to animals that had seen massive attrition of their populations. This designation has been adopted internationally and Warhol’s Endangered Species series represents this, consisting of a fairly diverse and cosmopolitan array of organisms.

Grevy’s Zebra 300 stands in as one of the avatars of Africa, joined also by the Black Rhinoceros and African Elephant. Specifically, the Grevy’s zebra is indigenous to parts of Kenya and Ethiopia, and is named after President of the Third Republic of France, Jules Grévy, who was gifted such a zebra by Abyssinian officials. It is one of three zebra species, besides the plains and mountain varieties.

What’s immediately striking about Grevy’s Zebra 300 is Warhol’s use of red. Though the zebra retains a bit of its natural black-and-white markings near its flank, its neck, mane, and head show a robust red that replaces the white. The red also plays a role in the classically Warholian drawn outline that follows the zebra’s body and stripes, being present on the right side of the frame, but gradually transitioning from red to orange and yellow, and finally, white as it progresses left. The dimensionality of the zebra is reduced, threatening to flatten it to a series of lines and stripes. The zebra is erased and abstracted, akin to the loss of the animal in the wild. The only thing that brings it into focus is its teal background, providing a relational and, paradoxically, complementary contrast. Environment (habitat) and organism (species) mutually afford each other.

Grevy’s Zebra 300 is undoubtedly a Warhol masterpiece, created in the 1980s when Warhol reached the peak of his skills. The work is quintessential to the artist’s evolving Pop Art techniques. Endangered Species is one of Warhol’s most cherished series, and has become especially beloved by collectors in recent years.

Andy Warhol's Turtle (FS. II.360A) created in 1985, is a striking example of the artist's ingenuity in screen printing and color experimentation. This piece, though often mistakenly thought to be part of Warhol's Endangered Species portfolio due to its thematic and stylistic similarities, stands as an independent artistic project. It was  commissioned for the British romantic comedy film Turtle Diary, which explores themes of liberation and connection, both of which are subtly echoed in Warhol's work. The print serves as a companion to the film, imbued with Warhol's style while contributing to the movie's narrative.

At first glance, Warhol's Turtle is an eruption of color and form, a departure from the natural hues typical of its subject. Blue, the color most naturally associated with sea turtles and their aquatic environment, is subverted with a metallic sheen, perhaps suggesting the unnatural interference of man in the natural world. The greens of the turtle's shell, typically emblematic of life and vitality, are here electrified, almost neon, further emphasizing the artificial over the natural. The turtle, centered and imposing, seems to float on the canvas, giving the composition a lively, dynamic quality. Its form is outlined in bold, confident strokes of red that enhance its shape and volume, suggesting both stillness and movement—a duality reflecting the characters' journey from inhibition to liberation in Turtle Diary.

Warhol's Turtle not only invites viewers to reflect on the beauty and exoticism of marine life but also subtly prompts a dialogue on environmental issues, much like his Endangered Species portfolio of two years prior. Although created as part of a separate project, the print shares the portfolio's spirit in its vivid celebration and implicit protection of animal life. The screen-printing process, with its capacity for replication and variation, underscores the theme of multiplicity—each turtle, each individual, is unique yet part of a greater whole. The act of releasing the turtles in the film becomes a poignant allegory for the characters' release from their own constraints, an idea that resonates through the energetic and seemingly liberated strokes of Warhol's turtle.

The interplay between texture and flatness is another characteristic Warholian element in this artwork. The flat, bold areas of color contrast with the textured, almost tactile quality of the outlined sections, creating a remarkable visual depth. The turtle, an ancient symbol of wisdom and endurance, becomes a metaphor in Warhol's hands, representing not only the arc of the characters' journey in the film, but also the persistence of nature. More recently, the artwork has been echoing the timeless moral of Aesop's fables in the art world; as Turtle gains momentum in the market for Warhol prints, it demonstrates that slow and steady does indeed win the race. This piece, through its confluence of environmental advocacy, filmic storytelling, and artistic innovation, has proven to be a vital and compelling component of Warhol’s artistic legacy. 

Executed in a crisply registered palette of bright white flowers against a bold green background, the Flowers Painting embodies one of Pop Art’s most iconic bodies of work: Andy Warhol’s Flowers. In the half century since its creation, Warhol’s Flowers have infiltrated popular culture as a touchstone of classic American Pop. During the summer of 1964, Warhol executed canvases portraying this exact composition in formats measuring twenty-four, forty-eight, and eighty-two inches square, intended for an exhibition with his new dealer Leo Castelli. At that inaugural exhibition, Warhol responded to the architecture of each gallery and installed the works in repetitive grids, creating an immersive environment of this signature motif, a display that was recently appropriated at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, where examples from the Flowers series – among others – were hung in a gallery wallpapered from floor to ceiling with similarly serial reproductions of the artist’s work. This dizzying and heady display echoed the initial environment in which these paintings were hung, at once anchoring them in the historical moment of their inception, but nevertheless proving the timeless appeal of this symbolic painting.

Flowers 69 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from the artist’s Flowers portfolio, published in 1970. The clash of radiant colors in Flowers 69 is distinctive of Warhol’s Pop sensibilities. In this image, he amplifies the appearance of hibiscus flowers blooming in a field of grass. By removing minute details and leaving the naked shape of four flowers, Warhol distills the subject’s beauty to its quintessence. “In the sixties,” he said, “you’d go and play up what a thing really was, you’d leave it ‘as is’.” Though the flowers appear stripped down, even deconstructed, they are still easily recognizable and familiar. Moreover, Warhol knew he could employ color and contrast to modernize such a classic symbol.

Warhol first revealed his Flowers portfolio in 1964 at the Leo Castelli gallery. He revisited the subject again in 1970 and went on to create additional portfolios, like Flowers (Hand-Colored) and Flowers (Black and White). Warhol often professed that he most enjoyed portraying the things he liked, and he had a clear affection for flowers. Additionally, the artist aimed to leave his mark on the timeless subject.

Warhol used a picture from the 1964 issue of Modern Photography for Flowers 69 and the rest of the prints in this series. His friend Henry Geldzahler found the photograph, and suggested he paint it in the spirit of portraying a more peaceful subject. Photographer Patricia Caulfield sued Warhol a few years later when she discovered the appropriation of her image. After, she won the case and even took home two prints from the collection. The incident troubled Warhol; from then on he chose to shoot his own photographs. “His entry into photography vis à vis his creation of silkscreen paintings was done out of necessity,” Gerard Malanga explained.

Flowers 69 displays the pale pink, blue and orange flowers against a hellish red backdrop. While the hibiscus blossoms remain front and center in this print, the intense, near-blinding hues in the background overshadow them. More than likely, Warhol chose to present the foreground as less important to challenge others’ expectations. After all, he claimed “Pop is just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside”. With that being said, the choice to use loud, electric colors is characteristic of Warhol’s standpoint as a Pop artist. With a strong background in commercial art, Warhol always intended to magnetize the viewer’s attention. Therefore, it’s likely that, partly due to his training, he naturally made the print as arresting as possible.

The 1970 Flowers series is a true classic and one of the most iconic works of Warhol’s career. It also marked the start of a productive decade for Warhol. In the ‘70s he would write his first book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), create the album cover for the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and publish numerous series like Space Fruit and Electric Chairs. Flowers 69 represents the perfect signpost between Warhol’s early years and his maturation as a famous artist in the years to come.

Flowers 71 by Andy Warhol is a screen print included in his super famous Flowers series from 1970. Warhol originally painted the flowers in 1964, and published the portfolio six years later. Among the complete portfolio, Flowers 71 displays Andy Warhol’s appreciation for beauty, both natural, yet stylistically synthetic. The original source image for the hibiscus flowers was found in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. However, the use of the copyrighted photo resulted in legal trouble for Warhol. Photographer Patricia Caulfield sued him in 1966 for appropriating her photographs for the series. Using images from external sources was not new to Warhol, and had brought him great success. But, the threat of the lawsuit nudged Warhol to begin experimenting with his own photography as source material for his silkscreen prints, albeit out of necessity.

After suffering a gunshot wound from Valeria Solanas in 1968, Warhol acquired a new perspective toward his surroundings. The shock of his near-death experience had a dissociative effect on him. “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life… Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.” The flower was a perfect subject to return to. It counteracted the violence he experienced, as well as the morbid imagery from his Death and Disaster works. The publication of the Flowers portfolio in 1971 would be the beginning of a shift toward less controversial prints in Warhol’s catalogue.

Portfolios such as Electric Chair and Skulls evoke death, and suggest Warhol’s ruminating on the human condition. At the same time, prints that depict lively themes began to proliferate through Warhol’s catalogue in the 70’s. Flowers seems to focus on a universal symbol of beauty, happiness, and peace. The essence of beauty derived from—and then altered from—nature is a common theme in Warhol’s works. Examples of these alluring alterations can be seen in portfolios such as Space Fruit, Sunset, and Grapes.

In Flowers 71, the juxtaposition of colors breaks the beautiful monotony of the hibiscus. Isolating different colors in this way allows for distinguished features to emerge. For example, the idea of the isolated beauty in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, goes as such: “Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.” In Flowers 71, the two top flowers oppose the yellow hibiscus duo, giving them prominence in the print.

Flowers 71 doesn’t seem to be liable to decay, yet attains a hauntingly fragile glow. The permanence of the print’s saturating hue remains imprinted in the eye of the viewer. The same can be said about the coloration of works such as Flowers 68, Liz Taylor, and Mao 98. The timeless beauty encapsulated in the Flowers portfolio is guaranteed to never lose its aura.

Flowers 73 by Andy Warhol is one of ten screenprints from the artist’s monumental Flowers series. Warhol originally conceived and exhibited Flowers during the 1960s, but returned to publish the images in 1970. The classic Flowers 73 is a blazing display of the artist’s Pop bravura. The loud colors and stripped down, commercialized subjects make this print one of Warhol’s most distinctive works. The complete Flowers series ranks amongst Warhol’s most valuable portfolios of all time.

Warhol loved flowers and once said he always took time to notice them. While his ascent to fame and renown came primarily from works like Triple Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Campbell’s Soup, the artist’s interests stretched far beyond the reaches of stardom. Portfolios like Electric Chair, Shadows, and Cow illustrate his range. No matter the subject, he could make any work of art relevant to modern society. Further, his iconic twist on such a timeless motif demonstrates Warhol’s singularity as an artist.

In Flowers 73, Warhol allowed the hibiscus blossoms to shine in shades of hot pink, yellow and lavender. Superimposed on a bed of neon green grass, the flowers perch atop the background in all their glory. Simultaneously, dark shadows interwoven through the image enhance the brilliant hues in the piece. While other prints in this series experiment with the relationship between the background and the foreground, Flowers 73 is much more classic. In placing colorful flowers against a field of bright green grass, Warhol leaves his mark on an artistic tradition. “In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art,” Gerard Malanga commented. “It was like, now we’re doing my flower period! Like Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers…”

While there is no doubt Warhol wanted his flowers to be a staple of modern art, he also wanted the image to be as commercial as possible. “I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” he said. Flowers 73 is an eye-catching piece that strips the petals of their detail, leaving only the familiar shapes and colors. In addition, he used the same silkscreen process for Flowers that he first created as a young commercial artist working on advertising campaigns. As a result, the work is a Technicolor feast for the eye and thus a celebration of everything Pop represented. Here, Warhol takes what is familiar and magnifies its splendor tenfold, making the image both popular and profitable.

Patricia Caulfield shot the original photograph used for Flowers 73, which appeared in Modern Photography’s June 1964 issue. She sued Warhol for using the image without her approval and won the case. After the trial, Warhol grew apprehensive about appropriating photographs and decided to start taking his own instead. Though the experience distressed him, it also led Warhol down a path of broadened exploration.

Flowers 73 is perhaps one of Warhol’s greatest works. While one may think of flowers as a common subject in the art world, Warhol made them over for a modern, consumer-oriented generation. Over fifty years have passed since he first painted the hibiscus flowers in the summer of 1964, yet the prints continue to be some of the most sought-after Warhols today.

Andy Warhol’s Grapes complete portfolio is part of the several still life portraits that he began to produce in the 1970s, including a special edition Grapes series with diamond dust. Along with the increase of still life works in his oeuvre, Warhol also began to incorporate more hand drawn lines into his compositions. This new technique, along with his signature color prints, made for beautiful pieces that contributed to his Grapes series.

Whereas past artists were interested in depicting a scene of banal subjects like fruit in the most realistic light possible, Warhol eschewed convention by taking a classical theme and adding a modern perspective. In the Grapes complete portfolio, Warhol uses color blocking techniques in order to create a fragmentation of each piece, resulting in a defamiliarization and a more abstract approach to the traditional subject matter.

The movement in the composition of each work also brings a new style to the still life genre. While fruits are typically represented in a more static manner, such as in a bowl or on a table, Warhol’s prints of grapes are unique in their arrangement, as they are shown hanging on vines. Warhol truly puts the “life” in still life in this series, and though it is one of the lesser known portfolios that Warhol created, it remains quite valuable. One particular edition of the Grapes portfolio was sold by Christie’s In 2011 for $104,500.

The traditional Grapes complete portfolio includes FS II.190-195, and the diamond dusted special edition collection includes FS II.196A-195A.

The Hans Christian Andersen complete portfolio by Andy Warhol is a series of four screenprints, three of which include a paper cut-out style based on characters from Andersen’s fairy tales. Andy Warhol was inspired by Andersen’s unique characters, which is why he devoted most of this portfolio to them, with only one portrait of the author himself. In this specific portfolio, Warhol uses a blue color to paint the illustrated form of Andersen in his print of the author. The other Andersen portfolio sees a double image of Andersen in black and white: one illustrated figure and one black and white photo-real figure. The series, completed in 1987, was printed by Rupert Jasen Smith in New York and published by Art Expo Danmark, Odense, Denmark.

Hans Christian Andersen became famous for his fairy tales that transcended age and culture. Considering Warhol took great interest in creating portraits and series on iconic figures, it is not surprising that Warhol would choose to create a series on the very talented and well-known author and his many wonderful characters. This portfolio is paired with Warhol’s other “Hans Christian Andersen I” complete portfolio from the same year.

THE HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN COMPLETE PORTFOLIO AS PART OF WARHOL’S LARGER BODY OF WORK
The Hans Christian Andersen complete portfolio is one of the last series that Warhol completed before his death later that year, along with Beethoven, Lenin, Moonwalk, Camouflage, and his other Hans Christian portfolio. Hans Christian Andersen and Beethoven mark a shift in Warhol’s work, in which he used darker background colors to occupy blank space and more simplistic representations of his subjects. During this period, Warhol’s artistic muses shifted from famous contemporary celebrities to obscure subjects of the past, like Andersen and Beethoven. The minimalistic yet eye-catching portfolio of Andersen is a testament to the diversity of Warhol’s oeuvre, and it is one of the most interesting series to get a look into the mind of Warhol at the end of his career. The complete Hans Christian Andersen complete portfolio includes FS II.398-401 and was posthumously stamped in black on verso.

John Gotti (Pink/Black/Green) by Andy Warhol as Part of his Larger Body of Work
John Gotti was a famous mobster from the Gambino crime family. Charged with murder, loansharking, racketeering, obstruction of justice, illegal gambling, tax evasion and more, he was, and is, the most infamous member of the Mafia. Andy Warhol had been known for his portraits at the time and caught the attention of Time magazine in 1986, which was dedicating a cover to Gotti in their “Mafia on Trial” September issue. It was during this time that Gotti had been arrested and was standing trial for racketeering, for which he was acquitted. Six years later, he was charged for murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Warhol was known for creating portraits of the beautiful and glamorous, but when Time magazine commissioned him to make this cover, he had a new type of subject to add to his portfolio. Although Gotti did not fit into Warhol’s usual movie star-musician-artist circle, he did possess some of the attributes that Warhol loved about celebrity life. Gotti was known as “Dapper Don” because of his personality in front of news cameras and his expensive clothing. He was glamorous in his own right, and a celebrity in his crime driven world, the public knew John Gotti’s name.

John Gotti, as depicted in John Gotti (Green/Orange/Blue) by Andy Warhol, was a famous mobster from the Gambino crime family. Charged with murder, loansharking, racketeering, obstruction of justice, illegal gambling, tax evasion and more, he was, and is, the most infamous member of the Mafia. Andy Warhol had been known for his portraits at the time and caught the attention of Time magazine in 1986, which was dedicating a cover to Gotti in their “Mafia on Trial” September issue. It was during this time that Gotti had been arrested and was standing trial for racketeering, for which he was acquitted. Six years later, he was charged for murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Warhol was known for creating portraits of the beautiful and glamorous, but when Time magazine commissioned him to make this cover, he had a new type of subject to add to his portfolio. Although Gotti did not fit into Warhol’s usual movie star-musician-artist circle, he did possess some of the attributes that Warhol loved about celebrity life. Gotti was known as “Dapper Don” because of his personality in front of news cameras and his expensive clothing. He was glamorous in his own right, and a celebrity in his crime driven world, the public knew John Gotti’s name.

Electric Chairs by Andy Warhol is a portfolio of ten different electric chairs, published in 1971. The premise of taking an object that holds a very specific meaning, isolating, abstracting and repeating it, is something that Warhol does throughout his work. By performing this process in his Electric Chair complete portfolio, the subject is no longer the electric chair and what it does; it’s about the image itself and the colors found in it. Notably, Electric Chairs ranks amongst Warhol’s top 10 most valuable portfolios of all time.

One of Warhol’s most famous series is the Death and Disaster collection, in which he explored images of plane crashes, suicides, and car crashes found in the media. They are his most controversial and thought-provoking works, and add another darker dimension to his art. Warhol first used the image of the electric chair in 1963, the year in which New York State conducted its final two executions at Sing Sing Penitentiary. The artist decided to explore themes of capital punishment in his work at the time, as it was a topical political theme that incited great contention.

Warhol also remained preoccupied with the overwhelming amount of news reports about violent deaths, and by taking and repeating these images from the media, he could comment on the desensitization of such pressing issues. As he once said, “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.” (Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part I,” Art News 62 (November 1963): 24-27, p. 60-63). Revolver Gallery has a complete portfolio of Warhol’s Electric Chair (FS II.74-83) available for purchase, as well as individual prints from the series.

Electric Chair as Part of Andy Warhol’s Larger Body of Work

As with many of Warhol’s work, he comments on American society with his Death and Disaster series. Warhol created the first image of the electric chair the same year that New York’s Sing Sing Penitentiary had its final two executions by electric chair. There was societal uproar during the 1960s surrounding the death penalty. With the series, Warhol also comments on society’s ability to numb itself from routinely-occurring tragedy. Like we have seen with other works by Warhol, the repetition of an image begins to reduce its power. He said, “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect” (“What is Pop Art?” 60). Warhol continued to work with this concept throughout his career.

Jane Fonda 268 (Trial Proof) depicts Jane Fonda, the celebrity sex symbol of her time and a part of American pop culture to this day. Fonda rose to fame in the 1960s for her roles in Cat Ballou (1965) and Barbarella (1968). Later in her career, she began to devote much of her time to political activism. In 1982, Warhol offered this print as part of a fundraiser for Fonda’s then husband, Tom Hayden. The image is reminiscent of Warhol’s earlier portraits of movie stars, Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. This Trial Proof print originally belonged to Martin Lawrence Galleries in New York.

Jane Fonda 268 (Trial Proof) by Andy Warhol as Part of His Larger Body of Work
This rare version as it signed not only by Andy Warhol, but also by Jane Fonda herself. Jane Fonda 268 Trial Proof is the portrait of the American actress whose first notable film was Barbarella (1968). Warhol’s fascination with stardom shines through with this portrait. The deep red background frames Fonda’s face and voluminous hair, emphasizing her vibrant red lips. The black accenting lines convey an almost comic book like quality, a technique widely used by pop artists at the time. Fonda, who is well-known for her political activism and protest of war and violence against women, wrote “Peace, Jane Fonda” along the bottom of the image.

Jacqueline Kennedy was and continues to be an American icon. By using images lifted straight from Life magazine, Warhol was commenting on media frenzy. Warhol continued later in his career to comment on American society using images of women who were icons of cinema, media or politics. During this time in his career, Warhol was making the shift from commercial illustrator to Pop artist. The Jacqueline Kennedy series has become almost as iconic as the Marilyn images because she represents another side of the American celebrity, which is, in her case, royalty.

Flash 37 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from the artist’s Flash series, published in 1968. Flash 37 serves to recall the collective memory of the Kennedy Assassination on November 22nd, 1963. The Flash portfolio features a collection of repurposed news clippings, campaign ads, and photographs from the days following the assassination. Originally, Warhol showed the prints next to varying teletype newswires that described the national tragedy. According to the Nielsen agency, 45.4% of Americans tuned in an hour after Lee Harvey Oswald fired the last bullet. Thus, the media greatly influenced how people would process the event, for days, months, and even years afterwards. Five years after Kennedy’s death, Warhol published the Flash series.

Flash 37 depicts a mail-order gun ad for the weapon used to kill JFK: the 6.5 Italian Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle. Perhaps surprisingly, Warhol depicted more guns besides Oswald’s rifle. Warhol painted various gun models 13 years after Valerie Solanas made an attempt on his life. Warhol used Solanas’s .32 snub-nosed revolver as inspiration for many of the prints, titled Gun. The ownership of firearms was just as prevalent in the US as it is today, however the JFK assassination would prompt the Gun Control Act of 1968–the same year of Warhol’s assassination attempt. By focusing on the weapon used by Oswald, Warhol also revealed the loose commercialization of firearms. The convergence of this print with Warhol’s assassination attempt and the 1968 Gun Control Act makes Flash 37 all the more legendary in Warhol’s catalogue.

JFK’s assassination became a historical milestone for those alive in 1963, and a date of intrigue for those born afterwards. Warhol was interested in what images the media imparted onto a shocked America: “I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart–but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.” The media blitz became enough of a sensation to capture Warhol’s attention, and the collective emotional distress that it caused was distressing in and of itself.

As tragedy befell presidential fame, the murder of JFK became a fabled moment in time. This pairing of tragedy and fame is evident throughout the Flash series, making it an important cultural artifact from the 1960s. Flash 37 is one of Warhol’s most sincere and deliberate works. The Flash portfolio closely relates to Warhol’s Death and Disaster collection, which presents a variety of gruesome images from newspapers and media headlines.

Warhol was commissioned by the Democratic National Committee to design a portrait for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. By employing Warhol as the artist, Jimmy Carter hoped to reach out to the younger voters and the voters of New York, thus utilizing Warhol’s status as a pop culture icon to his advantage. This strategic move by the hopeful Democratic was an attempt to position himself as a progressive candidate. This portrait shows Jimmy Carter with a gleaming smile, perhaps to appeal to his voters. Warhol added his own touch by embellishing the print with rich red and blue, and a peach color for Jimmy’s face and hand.

Andy Warhol created Edward Kennedy 240 to raise funds for Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential campaign. This work is particularly rare because it was a small edition originally intended only for donors of Kennedy’s campaign. This print, along with Edward Kennedy 241, are the only two prints that Warhol created of the famous politician. Warhol was vastly interested in political figures, with his prints such as Mao, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander the Great. However, he was doubly interested in the Kennedy family. In addition to the Edward Kennedy set, Warhol produced Flash, a portfolio of the death of John F. Kennedy, and a Jacqueline (Jackie) Kennedy portfolio.

Although Kennedy didn’t go on to win the Democratic nomination, he continued to pursue politics and became known as the “Lion of the Senate.” While in office, Kennedy wrote hundreds of bills that were passed and enacted into law. The image of Kennedy comes from a Polaroid taken by Warhol. Warhol often used Polaroid photographs to help create and inform his large-scale portraits of celebrities and pop culture icons, as he had been involved in several rifts about using copyrighted images from other artists.

Birmingham Race Riot 3 by Andy Warhol presents a sobering image of the civil disorder event that took place in Birmingham, Alabama. The piece represents social injustice‐a theme not often explored by Warhol. While many of his pieces may allude to societal issues, this print is one of the only Warhol pieces that explicitly demonstrates the need for racial equality, which was a major matter of contention in society at the time. Unlike his other works, Warhol adds none of his usual pomp and flair to this print. The strictly black and white colors of the print mirror the racial divide that was the source of the unfair and inhumane treatment against civilians. Additionally, the bold contrast of the black shadows against the stark-white highlights emphasize the dramatic structure of the scene.

Birmingham Race Riot 3 by Andy Warhol as Part of His Larger Body of Work
In this piece, Warhol recreated a scene that occurred in 1963 in which an agreement to partial desegregation of public spaces led to the violent clash between the Birmingham Police Department and black civilians of Birmingham. Birmingham Race Riot 3 is a print that was created early on in Warhol’s artistic career, which was based off a photograph taken by Charles Moore in Life Magazine, May 17, 1963. Warhol later made painted versions of the same subject.

Andy Warhol’s portrait of the Russian political leader Vladimir Lenin diverges from many of the conventions that seem to define his oeuvre. In this piece, Lenin is set against a deep red backdrop with minimal lines employed to distinguish his face and hand. The print lacks the contrast and details that characterize so many of Warhol’s prints. The lack of extraneous detail and color deters the viewer from focusing on anything else other than his face.The deep red color of the screenprint is as symbolic to the revolution as the man who led it. While Warhol was known for his self-admitted shallowness and obsession with glamour, Red Lenin 403 illustrates the diversity of Warhol’s subject matter. He was not simply confined to portraying beautiful celebrities or icons of wealth.

Warhol demonstrates the diversity of his subject matters as he reaches out beyond the realm of Hollywood celebrities, socialites, rock stars and wildly popular household items and explores a more daring subject — politics. By doing so, we are confronted with an ambiguously conflicting thought: Did Warhol choose a political figure as his focus to bring depth to his portfolio of motifs, or did he take the depth out of politics by choosing this subject matter to exist next to the ubiquitous images of soup cans, dollar signs and flowers? In fact, Warhol was deeply fascinated by political figures, regardless of how they are perceived. In addition to his Lenin portfolio, Warhol created prints of leaders such as Mao Zedong, Alexander the Great and John F. Kennedy.

Lenin 402 by Andy Warhol is a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the political leader of Russia. He was the father of Russia’s communist revolution. Thus, this print includes shades of red, the color most associated with communism. Lenin is primarily black and less defined to emphasize Lenin’s famous face and hand in red. His body blends in with the black background, allowing his face and hand to stand out. With this print, Warhol is able to emphasize the intelligence and power of the political leader.

Lenin 402 by Andy Warhol as Part of His Larger Body of Work
Warhol demonstrates the diversity of his subject matters as he reaches out beyond the realm of Hollywood celebrities, socialites, rock stars and wildly popular household items and explores a more daring subject — politics. By doing so, we are confronted with an ambiguously conflicting thought: Did Warhol choose a political figure as his focus to bring depth to his portfolio of motifs, or did he take the depth out of politics by choosing this subject matter to exist next to the ubiquitous images of soup cans, dollar signs and flowers? In fact, Warhol was deeply fascinated by political figures, regardless of how they are perceived. In addition to his Lenin portfolio, Warhol created prints of leaders such as Mao Zedong, Alexander the Great and John F. Kennedy.

Mao 90 by Andy Warhol is a dazzling pop art portrait from the artist’s 1972 Mao series. It may be referred to as the “blue-green Mao,” or possibly the “blue Mao” in reference to the face alone. The portfolio is among some of Warhol’s most famous works of art, and is perhaps his most controversial. The Pop artist expanded beyond American culture in this 1972 collection, taking on a divisive political subject. Chairman Mao ruled China for nearly thirty years as a dictator, spawning the cult-like ideology known as Maoism. The concept intrigued Warhol, who was no stranger to mass appeal.

During the 1970’s Warhol completed numerous celebrity portraits including Mick Jagger, Muhammad Ali, and Truman Capote. It could be argued that the decade represents Warhol’s most political era. For instance, Warhol composed a damning screen print of Richard Nixon in the same year as Mao 90. He portrayed the then-presidential candidate with devilish orange eyes, scribbling “Vote McGovern” underneath the portrait. Though he chose to highlight Nixon as his subject, Warhol created the image for the McGovern campaign. It was the first direct political message in his art. Near the end of the ‘70s, Warhol would also portray President Jimmy Carter and explore communist symbols in his Hammer and Sickle series.

Mao 90 conveys a different kind of message, but one no less powerful. In this portrait Warhol splashes Mao with electric blue and bright green hues, his brush strokes frantic and disordered. The loud colors clash against the very nature of life under communist China. “I’ve been reading so much about China,” Warhol stated. “They don’t believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It’s great. It looks like a silkscreen.” Warhol was utterly American in his love for capitalism and consumer culture. While the communist country’s condemnation of individualistic artwork outside the realm of state-approved propaganda baffled him, Warhol was also awed by Mao’s iconography. The culture relied on repetitive, mass-produced images of the ruler, making him something of a star.

By placing Mao through the lens of Pop, Warhol mashed together two opposing cultures. Yet in doing so, he displayed their uncanny similarities. The Mao series leads the viewer to wonder if America’s worship of celebrity idols is so different than fanatical support for political leaders and vice versa. Furthermore, in the collection Warhol explores both Mao’s international fame through the historical context of the Cold War and his anti-individualistic worldview. In giving Mao the same Pop art treatment as Mick Jagger or Muhammad Ali, he personalizes the leader and challenges his strongman image. Warhol suggests that ultimately, Mao is an icon who succeeded in selling an idea to the masses.

Mao 90 and the rest of the prints in this collection subvert the relationship between art and political propaganda. In addition, Warhol’s Pop take on politics gave new meaning to his work, allowing him to expand beyond American culture and create art on a grander scale. Art dealer Bruno Bischofberger suggested that Warhol stretch his ambitions by focusing on the greatest figures of the modern age, and the artist went several steps further. Moreover, Warhol’s efforts outlasted the political climate of his time. In 2013, China banned the pieces from appearing in a Warhol retrospective due to Mao’s embellished appearance. Mao 90 and similar works remain thought-provoking to this day.

Mao 95 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from the artist’s Mao (1972) portfolio, one of the artist’s most famous series. This specific version of Mao may be referred to as the “green Mao” in reference to the background, or the “salmon Mao.” Warhol became famous from his portraits of celebrities and consumer objects, although he found inspiration in politics as well. Some of Warhol’s other political imagery includes Alexander the Great, the Lenin prints, and his Jimmy Carter portraits.

The Mao series, which used Chinese propaganda as the basis for a silkscreen, makes up one of the most notorious series in Andy Warhol’s oeuvre. Warhol’s controversial decision to depict a communist leader is particularly fascinating given his entrepreneurial and individualistic ethos. The culture of Communist China, which shunned individuality and private enterprise, seems antithetical to the consumerist, celebrity-filled culture Warhol espoused. But Warhol, never afraid to employ irony and contradiction, found Communist China fascinating. In a similar manner to his famous celebrity prints, Warhol’s Mao is arguably one of the most important pieces in understanding his philosophy and place in history.

A year before he first started producing silkscreens of Chairman Mao, Andy Warhol said of China, “They don’t believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It’s great. It looks like a silkscreen”. One one hand, one might find it surprising that Warhol described the uniformity of imagery in China as “great”. At the same time, Warhol’s observation that Mao’s propaganda was “like a silkscreen” is a recognition of the overlap between two seemingly contradictory philosophies. Like Warhol, the Chinese Communist Party produced many prints of a single subject to glorify its image. In separating the image from its purpose, Warhol has the freedom to engage with it creatively through coloration and manipulation. More importantly, he expresses the irony in the similarity between the representation of an austere anticapitalist leader and the other celebrities and icons Warhol depicts.

The Mao series represents the capacity of Warhol’s philosophy to debase and absorb seemingly contradictory imagery into his body of work. Andy Warhol’s Mao is one of the most striking examples of the idea of “recuperation,” by which radical or anti-capitalist imagery is commodified and re-incorporated into capitalist culture. It presents Warhol’s artistic movement, ultimately, as indomitable. His work becomes so unchallenged that it can reincorporate any counter-ideological imagery as its own.

In Mao 95, Warhol colors Chairman Mao’s face with an eye-catching white, which, contrasted with the vibrant red on Mao’s lips, creates the unmistakable appearance of the Chairman in makeup. This is an especially ironic choice, given the Chinese Communist Party’s negative disposition towards individual expression. Warhol colors Mao’s coat and background in unusually subdued pastels–a pinkish red and an engaging yet calm green–which draws the viewer’s eye directly to Mao’s stern face. He also emphasizes Mao’s mole, which may be a reflection of Warhol’s well-known insecurities about his own blemishes. Warhol colors Mao’s eyes a deep purple, giving his stare a penetrating quality, and thus reflecting the intended power of the original propaganda. Ultimately, however, Mao’s portrait now exists in Warhol’s context, and on his terms.

Mao 99 is a print by Andy Warhol included in his Mao portfolio from 1972. Mao 99 (sometimes called the “blue Mao”) and the the nine other silkscreen prints in the series are the culmination of Warhol’s interest in Chinese culture, specifically, Maosim. The prints represent a puzzle of two opposing political ideologies. However, a glaring synthesis between Chinese propaganda and Warhol’s silkscreen printing technique occurs in the repetition of images. Repetition is the most immediate principle in capturing the attention of the masses–and the massively reproduced works of Zedong and Warhol prove this.

With this series, Warhol transgressed all of the strict and sacred depictions of the communist leader. Unsurprisingly, this caused a good bit of controversy at the time of publication in 1972. In Communist China, archetypal portrayals of Mao should remain serious and angelic, with warm hues. But, the Mao Portfolio transformed the former leader of the People’s Republic of China into a Pop-Art icon. Mao Zedong’s portrait from the cover of his Little Red Book was latent with the potential for artistic manipulation. The choice of imagery resulted in the removal of eight Mao prints from a worldwide retrospective of Warhol’s works after arriving in China in 2013. Chinese officials thought some people may confuse the colorization on Mao’s face with cosmetics.

The Mao Portfolio exposed the political side of Warhol, even though his formal position toward politics remained impartial. However, he did have interest in the political world, mainly as a part of his infatuation with famous people. His affinity for powerful figures shines through his work in portfolios such as Reigning Queens, Lenin, and Alexander the Great. The choice to depict Mao in a style akin to his famous celebrity prints suggests that Warhol wanted to capitalize on the Chairman’s politically charged aura. Just before the portfolio’s debut, the relevance of China in American media peaked. In 1972, Richard Nixon visited the global superpower in an attempt to foster diplomacy against the Soviet threat, inspiring Warhol to create the series.

Not even Warhol could outmatch the mass amount of Maoist iconography produced by the People’s Republic of China. Although, he didn’t need to. Instead, true to his ability to stylistically reintroduce ideas, people, and products back into the public sphere, Warhol created a metaphysical, visual art think-piece.

The contrast between the navy blue, bright green, and aqua background in Mao 99 makes for a lively composition. The vibrance of Mao’s green lips transforms his portrait into a fantasy. It is an impossible image; one that would stand 20 feet high if Disney were to reimagine Tiananmen Square. In 1982, Warhol gazed upon the equally famous portrait of Mao at the Tiananmen entrance to the Forbidden City.

The legacy of Mao is forever, by design. The art of designing is based upon organized structures, and Warhol had seized the means of artistic expression. Therefore, the construction of Mao’s god-like image (in the making since the 1940s) was already primed for the reconstruction that Warhol performed on him. Mao 99 is Warhol at his most clever, and his most political. Besides being highly controversial, the ultra famous portfolio is one of the artist’s most coveted creations.

Marilyn Invitation 12″ X 12″ (Castelli Graphics) is a miniature version of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe artwork and was created as an announcement for the exhibition Andy Warhol: A Print Retrospective 1963-1981 on display from November 21 to December 22, 1981 at Castelli Gallery in New York. Along with his pop art images of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol created celebrity portraits of famous icons. Most recognizable portraits include Marilyn Monroe and Jane Fonda. Originally printed in the early 1960s, Marilyn became the quintessential icon in the Pop Art Movement and for Warhol.

After the success of the Campbell’s Soup Can series in the early 1960s, Andy Warhol began creating screenprints of celebrity portraits including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. In addition, Warhol expanded into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show between 1966 and 1967 called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the rock band The Velvet Underground. Warhol also worked with his Superstar performers and various people to create hundreds of films between 1963 and 1968. These films were scripted and improvised ranging from conceptual experiments and simple narratives to short portraits and sexploitation features. His works include Empire (1964), The Chelsea Girls (1966), and The Screen Tests (1964-66).

Martha Graham Complete Portfoliois a portfolio of three screenprints created by Andy Warhol in 1986. It includes Satyric Festival Song 387, Lamentation 388, and Letter to the World (The Kick) 389. Known as the mother of the modern movement, Martha Graham’s influence on dance and performing arts is profound. Ahead of her contemporaries, she was the first dancer to perform at the White House and founded the renowned Martha Graham Dance Company in New York. She once said, “I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable” (New York Times, 1985). Starting in 1929, Graham danced professionally until her retirement in 1958. However, she continued to teach at her dance company until her death in 1991 at the age of 96.

Warhol captures the beauty of dance and replicates its splendor in the Martha Graham complete portfolio. The source image for the series was taken by American photographer Barbara Morgan, who was best known for her depictions of modern dancers. Warhol created this series to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the Martha Graham Dance Center of Contemporary Dance in New York. Warhol’s portfolio compliments Graham by showing a variation of her abilities not just as a dancer, but as someone who communicates profound emotion through movement and physical expression.

Mick Jagger 138 is a screenprint by Andy Warhol from the artist’s Mick Jagger portfolio (1975). A plethora of bands pioneered a wave of cultural liberation during the 1970’s, making the decade a golden age for rock and roll. Formed in 1962, The Rolling Stones were a sexier, wilder act than the Beatles, and Mick Jagger garnered attention for his lewd dance moves and enigmatic stage persona. Mick Jagger 138 features the iconic lead singer of the rock and roll group at the height of this period. Warhol first met Jagger at a party in 1963, the same year he began working on feature length films like Sleep. However, they would not collaborate professionally for another 6 years.
In 1969, Jagger wrote a letter to Warhol asking him to craft an album cover for his band’s upcoming record, Sticky Fingers. Initially, he did not want the album to be too complicated and expressed concern that this could cause irritating delays. “But, having said that, I leave it in your capable hands to do whatever you want,” he avowed.

By this point, Warhol had already produced the Velvet Underground’s first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. The cover, showing off a banana fashioned in Pop Art bravura, urged the owner to “Peel slowly and see”. When peeled back, the sticker revealed an erotic flesh-colored banana. Taking Jagger’s invitation in stride, Warhol chose to make Sticky Fingers an interactive experience as well. The cover showed a below-the-waist shot of a man wearing a tight pair of Levi’s and included a real zipper that exposed the model’s underwear. Despite its complicated packaging, the album quickly went to Number 1 on the Billboard Chart.

Jagger and Warhol came together again in 1975, when Mick Jagger and the Stones visited his Montauk residence. It was here that they would rehearse for their upcoming tour, and Warhol got a glimpse of Jagger’s appeal firsthand. “Mick Jagger really put Montauk on the map,” Warhol observed. “Two girls with no hair and black cats on leashes followed them all the way to Montauk. Mr. Winters, the caretaker of the estate, found them hiding in the bushes!” Soon after, Warhol took several Polaroids of Jagger that he would eventually turn into a full portfolio. Jagger’s rebellious personality captivated Warhol, but he was also impressed with the rock star’s business savvy. Warhol’s fascination with stardom and commercialism made it the perfect collaboration.

Mick Jagger 138 is unique to this collection as it brings attention to Mick Jagger’s eyes rather than his famous lips. A distinct line drawing further emphasizes one eye, thus drawing the viewer’s mind to Jagger’s internal world. Jagger faces the camera head on, his expression nakedly sincere. Warhol’s use of lighter colors like white, translucent blue and teal bring a continued sense of openness to the work. Yet there is still something mysterious about Warhol’s portrayal of Jagger here. It begs the question: What is going on in his mind?

Warhol had always viewed rock and roll as a transformative force. In his Triple Elvis print (from his most valuable paintings ever sold), he explored the power an enigmatic figure could have on popular culture. Mick Jagger 138 is a continuation of this exercise, an examination of the way one persona can change the world.

Mick Jagger 139 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from the artist’s iconic Mick Jagger portfolio (1975). The series presents the rock star from several vantage points. The idea of stardom had captured Warhol’s attention from a young age, when he first glimpsed Hollywood celebrities in magazines. It would continue to be a major force in his art throughout his life. He was fascinated with the way celebrities invented themselves, crafting and molding their own images. His utilization of color, line sketches, and screen prints in this series was key to mining the complex nature of celebrity. Mick Jagger 139 uses these collage elements to convey Jagger’s multiplicity. Additionally, the piece exhibits what Warhol did best: observe popular culture with a keen eye, then turn it back on the viewer to digest from a new perspective.

Warhol paid close attention to Jagger after they met at a party in the 1960’s. Though he would gain worldwide fame with the Rolling Stones, Jagger himself became a symbol of youthful rebellion. Of course, Warhol was unsurprised by his ascent to stardom. In the 1979 book Exposures, he explained Jagger’s mass appeal: “1) He’s very talented; 2) He’s very intelligent; 3) He’s very handsome; 4) He’s very adorable; 5) He’s a great business person; 6) He’s a great movie star; 7) I like his fake cockney accent… Image is so important to rock stars.” He understood that Jagger was a force to be reckoned with, onstage and off, because he had mastered his public image.

Like Elvis before him, Jagger became the face of rock and roll in the 1970’s. He also reinvented it for a new sexually liberated generation. Further, his choice to turn to Warhol for the cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1971 album Sticky Fingers was a clever move that would set the stage for their future collaboration. The eroticized album cover featuring a man in a tight pair of Levi’s was a massive success. Four years later, the Stones visited Warhol’s Montauk home to rehearse for a tour. Here at his “Summer Factory” Andy often hosted celebrities like Truman Capote, Liza Minelli, Keith Haring and the Kennedys. While rehearsing and maneuvering hordes of fans that came to Montauk to catch a glimpse of the Stones at work, Jagger permitted Andy to take several Polaroid shots of him.

Mick Jagger 139 employs intense shades of black, maroon, gold and deep pink to frame Jagger’s features. The placement of the line drawing creates a three-dimensional effect, emphasizing the magnitude of Jagger’s character. The image is kaleidoscopic and illusory, leading the viewer’s eye multiple places at the same time. While the sketched version of Jagger looks to one side, the photographed version looks to the other. Consequently, the layers overlap in a way that suggests even Mick may have had a difficult time separating his true self from his carefully crafted image. Mick Jagger 139 is a paramount example of Warhol at his most cunning, and most creative moment.

Mick Jagger 142 is a screenprint by Andy Warhol included in his iconic Mick Jagger series (1975). Whereas many of Warhol’s portfolios include multiple famous figures, this one concentrates on Jagger alone. Like in his Campbell Soup Cans series, Warhol chose to repeat one subject from slightly dissimilar points of view. While his soup cans convey different flavors, each Mick Jagger screen print showcases the various sides of his personality. By this time, both Warhol and Jagger had gained massive popularity in America. They were at the pinnacle of their careers. As they were equally captivated by each other, it was no surprise that their partnership would produce momentous art.

Mick Jagger 142 is perhaps the most lighthearted in the portfolio, showing Jagger in a candid moment of laughter. Warhol often liked to display the light with the dark as well as the ups and downs that came with being a pop icon. He wanted to examine fame and celebrity from numerous angles. The line drawing placed on a golden backdrop is a feature unique to this print; it adds a sense of motion to Jagger’s features. The viewer can almost feel laughter radiating from the portrait. As with other works in this series, there is a strong emphasis on Jagger’s wide mouth, androgynous hair and animated eyes. Warhol’s collage elements are present but used with a lighter touch. He likely wanted to allow Jagger’s buoyancy to shine through this particular piece.

“If you want to be reminded of a certain period,” Jagger commented, “you can look at what Andy was doing then. He was very much in tune with what was going on. Of course, he was criticized for that, for being sort of trendy. But I think some people’s great forte is being so in touch”. In the series, Warhol highlighted one of the most powerful trends of the era—rock and roll.

Though he had previously illustrated the genre’s importance to American culture (namely in his Triple Elvis piece and his work on the Rolling Stones album cover, Sticky Fingers), this was an in-depth study of one singer. Jagger was instrumental to the sound of the ‘70s, and the Stones influenced pop culture as a whole. Mick Jagger 142 brings the 1970’s to life and captures its aura: Warhol saw the time as vibrant, but complicated.

Though Warhol still remained an astute observer during this time, he became more reserved after he was shot in 1968. The wildness of the Factory days had come to a close, and Warhol turned to new opportunities that excited him. The same year he completed Mick Jagger 142, Warhol founded Interview magazine. He also released his first book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. In the ‘70s what he called business art was his main focus. Mick Jagger knew how to use his persona to his benefit, and his popularity and success enthralled Warhol. Jagger respected Warhol’s artistry in equal measure. It was an ideal collaboration, and the portfolio remains one of Warhol’s greatest efforts. Mick Jagger 142 is a prime example of Warhol’s pop-art mastery, and his ability to represent the zeitgeist of his time.

Mick Jagger 143 is a screenprint by Andy Warhol in his signature collage style, from the Mick Jagger portfolio. The piece is a testament to Warhol’s study of celebrity. The collection displays Jagger through a lens of varied angles and facial expressions, while Warhol’s use of color serves to amplify the rockstar’s most alluring qualities. Like the others in the series, Mick Jagger 143 includes both Warhol’s signature in pencil and Jagger’s in felt pen.

Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger met at a party in the early 1960’s. The Rolling Stones were flying high on their first U.S. tour at the time. From their first meeting, Warhol was surely enamored by Jagger’s rock and roll persona and his sex symbol status. He would later say of Jagger, “He’s androgynous enough for almost anyone.” Both being social creatures with a love of nightlife, the two would spend a lot of time together over the years. This led to their collaboration in 1971, when Jagger asked Warhol to work on the album cover for Sticky Fingers. The cover went on to become one of the most famous and subversive in rock and roll history. Featuring a close-up shot of a zipper and tight-fitting pair of jeans, its phallic imagery exhibited Warhol’s fascination with the band’s hypersexual image.

Four years later, Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca stayed at Warhol’s home in Montauk. Here the band would rehearse for their upcoming Tour of the Americas. The Stones had reached the zenith of their popularity in the U.S. and Warhol used the opportunity to take several semi-nude Polaroid shots of Jagger. Soon afterward, he created screen prints from these and intermixed them with line drawings and blocks of color. This combination of elements represents Warhol’s distinctive technique.

This was not Warhol’s first foray into rock and roll. In 1963 he completed his Triple Elvis, a dedication to Elvis Presley’s domination of pop music and the silver screen. The Mick Jagger series, then, represents a transformation of sorts. Here Warhol illustrates that the face of rock and roll has shifted to become multifaceted, more overtly sexual and even genderless.

Each part of Mick Jagger 143 has sure purpose: the focal point of the image is the color red to emphasize Mick Jagger’s legendary lips, whereas the pastel green above the eyes adds a surprising shade of innocence to Jagger’s bad boy personality. Meanwhile, Warhol’s placement of the line drawings implies a sense of movement. This alludes to Mick Jagger’s feverish dance moves onstage. In this piece his open-mouthed, candid expression contrasts the other 9 works, which feature looks of contemplation, rebelliousness and laughter.

In this series Warhol clutches the zeitgeist of the 1970’s counterculture. He saw Mick Jagger as both an exciting and complicated figure of his time who held the spotlight with an untamed gaze. Ever since his captivation with Elvis, Warhol had kept an eye on the power of rock stardom. Mick Jagger 143 proceeds one step further and seizes upon the raw spirit of American pop culture. Through Mick Jagger, Warhol captures its shades of light and dark, its highs and lows and its erotic beauty.

Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger 145 is one of ten famous screenprints from the artist’s Mick Jagger portfolio. Each print reveals a different angle of the Rolling Stones frontman, and incorporates solid abstract shapes to emphasize various features. Mick Jagger 145 focuses on the singer’s famous lips, along with his bare upper torso and neck.

Warhol and Jagger met in 1964 at a party in New York during the Rolling Stones’ first US tour. Both parties had just begun their rise to fame. They became close friends and collaborated several times during their careers. In 1971, the Stones asked Warhol to design their album cover for Sticky Fingers. In a letter sent to Warhol, Jagger gave him total creative freedom with the design, asking him only to avoid complex designs which could delay the record’s release. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warhol neglected this advice and created a controversial close-up image of a man’s crotch wearing tight jeans (that man on the cover is actor and Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro) with a functional zipper. This erotic design was a daring but suitable fit for the rock star. He attained a sex symbol status, which is further explored in quasi-erotic prints similar to Mick Jagger 145.

Warhol understood Mick Jagger’s stylish image, declaring that he was “androgynous enough for almost anyone”. Warhol became great friends with Jagger’s wife, Bianca, as well, and even taught their daughter Jade how to paint. The images in this series are based on polaroids that Warhol took of Mick Jagger in his house in Long Island, where Jagger and his wife were vacationing. Andy seemed to obsess over Jagger’s “bad boy” image. He was able to emphasize the rock star’s charms through these photos, in which we glimpse the multifaceted regions of Jagger’s personality.

Many of Warhol’s series use a single picture and a more repetitive style, like in Marilyn Monroe and Mao. In this portfolio, however, Mick Jagger 145 is one of ten unique photos, as Andy recently began experimenting with his own photography as a means to create screenprints. This shift was partly due to the aftermath of Warhol’s Flowers series, when Patricia Caulfield sued him for appropriating her photography. As a consequence, Andy became more anxious about copyright laws, causing him to use his own photos more often. He started taking his polaroid camera everywhere he went, calling it his “date” to parties.

Warhol’s life quieted down after the rowdiness of the 1960’s Factory era. From the late 60s through the 1970s, he focused on art, photography, and entrepreneurial pursuits. He gathered many celebs for portraits during this period, such as Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, and of course, Mick Jagger (to name a few). He went on to take portraits of all kinds of figures, including fellow artists Man Ray and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1969, Warhol founded his famed Interview magazine with the help of his trusty associate Gerard Malanga.

Mick Jagger 145 is undeniably Pop. However, in this portfolio, Warhol manifests a non-representational style which began emerging from his work in the 1970s. He uses blocks of color and pencil detailing to deliver an abstract, collage-like feel. This style would continue into his 1980s portfolios, evident in works such as Reigning Queens and Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.

Mick Jagger 146 by Andy Warhol is one of the artist’s most famous portraits. Completed in 1975, Mick Jagger 146 is one of ten screen prints from Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio. This series captures the famous rock star in a variety of angles, each of which shows a different side of Jagger. Similar to Warhol’s other portraits, such as his Reigning Queens series and his iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, the Mick Jagger portfolio presents the same repetitive style.

In this particular print, Mick Jagger stares back at the viewer with a straight face. This image presents a serious side of the rock star, a more intimate version of himself. Unlike many of his other portraits, Warhol used a minimal amount of color when creating this piece. In Mick Jagger 146, white, black, and gold are the only present colors.

It is no surprise that Warhol had a clear fascination with Hollywood fame and stardom. His love for his “superstars” and their extravagant lifestyles became a common theme in Warhol’s work. Some of Warhol’s other work which features well-known stars includes Liz Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Jane Fonda.

Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger first met in 1964 at a party for the Rolling Stones in New York, during the band’s first US tour. When they met, both artists were on the rise to fame. Jagger would eventually become an active member of the Factory scene, which led to the friendship between him and the artist. Andy Warhol became very close friends with Jagger, his wife Bianca, and even taught their daughter Jade how to paint.

Although Warhol admired many of his subjects, his bond with Jagger was more than a personal friendship. The two collaborated many times in their professional life as well, working together for the first time in 1971 on the album artwork for Sticky Fingers (1971). This iconic cover design features a close up of a man’s crotch in tight jeans, with a functional zipper and belt buckle. Besides works like Mick Jagger 146, Warhol and Jagger’s blossoming friendship would lead to a number of artistic collaborations during their careers. In the summer of 1975, Jagger and his wife Bianca rented Warhol’s Long Island home. There, Warhol captured the famous polaroids of Jagger that would form the basis for the series.

When talking about his admiration for Jagger, Warhol once said, “1 – He’s very talented; 2 – He’s very intelligent; 3 – He’s very handsome; 4 – He’s very adorable 5 – He’s a great business person; 6 – He’s a great movie star; 7- I like his fake cockney accent… Image is so important to rock stars. Mick Jagger is the rock star with the longest running image.”

The feelings of admiration were mutual between the two friends. In tribute to the late artist, Mick Jagger stated: “The thing that he seemed to be able to do was to capture society, whatever part of it he wanted to portray, pretty accurately. That’s one thing artists do, is show people later on what it was like. If you want to be reminded of a certain period, you can look at what Andy was doing then. He was very much in tune with what was going on. Of course, he was criticized for that, for being sort of trendy. But I think some people’s great forte is being so in touch.”

Mick Jagger 146 features the lead singer of British rock band The Rolling Stones. The series of ten screen prints shows the rock ‘n roll bad boy through a variety of different poses, facial expressions, and abstracted blocks of color. Besides being some of his most iconic work, Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio highlights the complexities of Jagger as an artist and friend.

Mick Jagger 147 was painted while Warhol was at the height of fame. Warhol spent a lot of time with Jagger and his then wife Bianca. He was was closest to their Jagger’s daughter, Jade, whom Andy taught how to paint. He produced this screenprint of Mick Jagger as part of a portfolio of 10 in 1975.

Muhammad Ali 181 by Andy Warhol is one of four portraits in the 1978 Muhammad Ali portfolio. Andy Warhol screenprinted each portrait in the suite on Strathmore Bristol Paper. The Muhammad Ali portfolio is a part of Warhol’s larger Athletes series, commissioned by Richard Weisman in 1977.

The Athletes series features ten of the most talented athletes of the time. Alongside Muhammad Ali 181, the series includes O.J. Simpson, Dorothy Hamill, Pelé, Jack Nicklaus, Rod Gilbert, Tom Seaver, Willie Shoemaker, Chris Evert, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Commissioner Richard Weisman selected each athlete, and Warhol photographed them with his trusty Polaroid camera. He then used Polaroid shots as the source images for the portraits.

The Muhammad Ali portfolio stands apart from the Athletes series as a closer study of the famous boxer. In fact, the final portrait of Ali used in the Athletes series is not from the Muhammad Ali portfolio at all.

Many athletes from the Athletes portfolio have prominent depictions of sports equipment in their portrait. Figure skater Dorothy Hamill, for example, is pictured with her skates while soccer star Pelé appears with a soccer ball. In the Athletes portfolio portrait, Muhammad Ali is similarly depicted, with his hands—the equipment of his profession—in fists guarding his face. Ali poses in the Orthodox stance, his standard fighting configuration with his strong right fist toward the back.

With Muhammad Ali 181, Warhol separates the equipment from the athlete, honing in on Ali’s hands as tools or equipment of his trade. In the portrait, Ali’s clenched fist appears in a block of burnt red against a blue background, with a blue outline that clearly distinguishes it from his chest. The burnt red is almost a blood-like color, highlighting Ali’s legendary power. However, the separation between body and fist seems to invite the audience to consider Ali as a fragmented figure: as a man and an athlete, or a public figure. This fragmentation reflects Warhol’s fascination with the fame and celebrity that may accompany a career as a professional athlete. After all, that was his primary reason for completing the commissioned portfolio.

Warhol said of his Athletes series: “I really got to love the athletes because they are the really big stars.” Just as Warhol portrays the fame of movie stars with nuance, Muhammad Ali 181 depicts the complexities of Ali’s fame. Ali’s hand, signifying the skills for which he gained notoriety, is the subject of the portrait, not Ali himself. Thus, Muhammad Ali 181 is a striking portrait of Ali’s legacy and fame, rather than the boxer himself.

Muhammad Ali 182 by Andy Warhol is one of four screenprints from Warhol’s Muhammad Ali series. The series is also a component of his greater Athletes portfolio, showcasing the flourishing athletes of the 1970’s. The work includes big names like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jack Nicklaus, and, of course, the legendary Muhammad Ali. Warhol’s unique artistic expression in Muhammad Ali 182 explores how Ali’s sports persona can become an artistic one, enhancing this legend’s celebrity status and connecting him to a wider audience.

Muhammad Ali 182 honors one of the most iconic athletes of the modern era. His mythical athleticism and civil rights heroism is universally influential and recognizable. Muhammad Ali 182 is a stylized front-facing portrait of the celebrity boxer, who is positioned in the Orthodox boxing stance. A mustard yellow background lightens the tone of Ali’s focused gaze. Fuchsia and white geometric lines highlight his form and sketched features. The sketched shading under Ali’s fist accentuates its combative protection, while drawing attention to his face. Ali’s eyes appear to be the most realistic facial feature. They soften his hardened fighter persona, and give him a more wholesome and human charisma. Although other works in the series, like Muhammad Ali 181, bear an emblematic fist in the same fighting position, Muhammad Ali 182 uses the fist to compliment the star athlete’s face.

“I said that athletes were better than movie stars and I don’t know what I’m talking about because athletes are the new movie stars,” Warhol once said. This quote is especially applicable to Ali as it examines the notion of fame and its broadening horizons beyond actors; chiefly as television began reinforcing the athlete as an identity to be observed and admired. These lines are blurred by Warhol, who catalyzed evolving perceptions of celebrity by framing athletes like Muhammad Ali in the same context as his glamorous celebrity muses.

Though Warhol had a hard time getting a hold of him, he eventually invited Andy to his training camp in Pennsylvania for the photoshoot. This elusiveness likely increased Ali’s godlike mythos in Warhol’s eyes, enabling him to depict the boxer with a greater resplendence than athletes of the past.

By the time art and sports enthusiast Richard Weisman commissioned the series, Muhammad Ali had won his third heavyweight championship title. This win became the capstone of Ali’s professional fighting career. Almost unbelievably, Ali won this championship following a three year forced hiatus after refusing to fight in Vietnam. During that time, Ali’s civil rights activism developed rapidly, and he achieved more media fame for his words than his fists. Muhammad Ali 182 may connect to this motif, as the legendary boxer puts up his fists in a fight for justice.

Andy Warhol created Muhammad Ali 182 at the height of Ali’s global stardom. In the print, the candid actualization of his athletic dominance and civil rights perseverance leaves audiences awestruck by the face of a true celebrity.

Andy Warhol published his Muhammad Ali portfolio of 4 prints in 1978, just one year after completing his Athletes series of paintings, which also included the boxer. The work is notable for being the first series Warhol printed featuring an athlete, and also as the first depiction of a black figurehead in Warhol’s work.

This particular set of four prints, acquired by Revolver Gallery in October of 2022, are signed by both Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali, making them especially rare. Unlike some other series in which Warhol’s subject would sign the prints alongside him, such as Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio, Ali did not sign the prints as they were published. According to Harlan Werner, who was Ali’s memorabilia agent for over 30 years, there are only 6 known complete editions of the portfolio that are signed by both Ali and Warhol. These were signed on July 13th, 1999 in Los Angeles, California, where Werner was present for the signing. Ostensibly, some individual prints have been signed by Ali—still, only 6 full series include both Warhol’s and Ali’s signatures. There is thus an unknown number of individual “double-signed” Muhammad Ali prints, only signed by the boxer on rare occasions after the series was published in 1978.

Warhol was commissioned by Richard Weismann to create a series of athlete portraits in 1977. To capture images of Ali, Warhol traveled to his training camp near Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, dubbed “Fighter’s Heaven.” He shot various photographs of the boxer using his trusty polaroid camera; he used to cal it his “pen and paper.” At the time, Ali was a three-time heavyweight champion, and a quintessential figure to illustrate the blurred lines between common notions of celebrity and the public identity of sports figures. While an image of Ali was included in Athletes, the Muhammad Ali complete portfolio departs from Weismann’s original commission. Warhol decided to use four additional photos for the Muhammad Ali portfolio itself. Thus, in the series, Warhol performs an intimate study of the famous boxer.

The Muhammad Ali portfolio includes action photos of the boxer taken in the midst of a training session. Ostensibly, Ali was an uneasy subject, not used to posing for the camera. In Muhammad Ali 179, Warhol captures Ali in profile—his face color-blocked in a warm brown. He looks left toward an unseen opponent. In 180, Warhol depicts Ali looking downward, his eyes unseen as he appears to evade a blow. Muhammad Ali 181 captures only Ali’s fist and chest, a powerful depiction of the instruments that made Ali famous. In 182, we see Ali facing frontwards, hands guarding his face and looking directly at the audience, ready to fight.

In all of these portraits, Ali appears with energy and intensity. The portraits feature warm brown color blocking on Ali’s face and body against bright backgrounds with small colorful details. Warhol outlines details of the portraits with thin, black strokes and dark smudges of shadow. The compositional variety in the portfolio captures multiple sides of Ali. Muhammad Ali 180 and 182 appear to capture the most movement, 179 and 181 appear to capture Ali in fragments.

When speaking about his Athletes series, Andy Warhol famously said, “I really got to love the athletes because they are the really big stars.” In the portfolio, each portrait captures the details of what gave Ali his superhero-like persona. As always, Warhol depicts fame with nuance, capturing the complexities of Ali’s persona in each portrait.

Created in 1981, Andy Warhol’s Myths complete portfolio consists of ten screenprints showcasing some of the most iconic fictional characters from the 20th century. Warhol expressed great interest in the world of celebrity, consistently drawn to the extravagance and glamor of Hollywood and the giants that dominated the industry. He portrayed a range of high-profile figures and icons: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Mao Zedong, and many more. The Myths collection, however, offers a fresh reading of the artist’s conventional themes, crossing into the realm of fiction with popular characters from history, literature, film, and television. Though these figures originate from various sources, they are alike in the way that they impacted whole generations at a level we can only imagine. Most of these figures are widely-recognized symbols of childhood nostalgia and manufactured dreams, reminding us of careless weekends and golden mornings spent before the television.

Apart from their widespread relevance, each print in Myths also holds a personal connection to Warhol, shedding light on the incredibly influential yet enigmatic figure. Each one reveals a distinct facet of Warhol’s personality. His depictions of Santa Claus and Superman, for instance, link back to his childhood: one reflects his long-standing love for Christmas, and the other his appreciation for the archetype of the unlikely hero. Warhol suffered from an immobilizing illness as a child that diminished his strength and rendered him frail, thus he found comfort in the mild-mannered news reporter slash laser-shooting superhero Clark Kent. Uncle Sam, on the other hand, establishes the artist’s attachment to all things America. As one of the most quintessentially American artists of that time, his artworks embody cultural themes integral to post-war America, such as consumerism and the cult of celebrity.

The Myths complete portfolio includes FS II.258-267: The Star, Uncle Sam, The Witch, Mammy, Howdy Doody, Dracula, Mickey Mouse, Superman, Santa Claus, and The Shadow. The reference material for some of these prints are Polaroid photographs of his friends in full costume and makeup. Others are still images from old Hollywood movies and television. Warhol enlarged the standard images and spruced them up with vibrant colors, tracings, and dynamic compositions. The series epitomizes the artist’s ability to distill American popular culture into powerful, evocative images and for this reason, has come to include some of Warhol’s most valuable and sought after works.

MYTHS COMPLETE PORTFOLIO by ANDY WARHOL AS PART OF HIS LARGER BODY OF WORK

Myths exemplifies Warhol’s unerring sense for the powerful motifs of his time. The images portray the universal view of America’s once captivating and commanding past, comprised of characters loved by children such as Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus, as well as fictional figures like Dracula, The Wicked Witch of the West, and Uncle Sam. Each character in the Myths complete portfolio is meant to represent a different facet of Andy Warhol’s personality. Warhol created the collection in the early 1980s, arguably his most prolific period. He practiced and perfected his screen printing methods and produced other incredibly intricate works during this time, including the Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century and Endangered Species series.

Edition of 200, 30 AP, 5 PP, 5 EP, 4 HC, signed and numbered in pencil as follows: The Star, The Witch, Howdy Doody-verso; Uncle Sam, Superman, Mammy, Dracula, Santa Claus, The Shadow-lower right; Mickey Mouse-lower left. All regular edition prints have diamond dust. Portfolio of 10 screenprints.

The Witch 261 is a print by Andy Warhol created in 1981 for the Myths series. Enthralled by the aesthetics of American popular culture, Warhol produced a remarkable number of artworks centered around Hollywood fame, from commissioned portraits to appropriated images of celebrities. While his obsession with celebrity culture endured, his subject matter expanded over the years to include athletes (who he called the “movie stars” of the 70s), politicians, and fictional characters. The Myths portfolio spotlights ten of the most iconic fictional characters since the turn of the 20th century. Some fight for the good of humanity as stalwart heroes; others cause mayhem as uncompromising villains. Though these figures may only exist in our imaginations, our most beloved bedtime stories, and favorite animated films, they altered the history of entertainment as prominent symbols of childhood nostalgia and manufactured dreams.

The Witch 261 depicts a woman with vibrant green skin dressed entirely in black. The source material for some of Warhol’s Myths prints were Polaroid portraits of people in costumes and makeup. The artist called upon Margaret Hamilton herself, the actress who portrayed the witch in the original 1931 film The Wizard of Oz, to recreate her pose for the basis of the print. Contrasting with the less-animated expressions of Uncle Sam and The Star, the Witch’s lips are curled back in a maniacal laugh. The plain purple background complements her lurid green complexion; additional traces of red and green outline her wide-brimmed hat and dark clothing, a technique Warhol used frequently to highlight the subject of his prints. The Witch 261 is inlaid with diamond dust, tiny crystals that further enhance the artwork’s value and glamor.

Ostensibly, each print in the Myths series represents a unique facet of Warhol’s birthday. The Witch 261 showcases the notorious Wicked Witch of the West, the most frightening ruler in all of Oz—a power-hungry sorcerer with a flair for the dramatic, who commands an army of flying monkeys and has an unusual intolerance to water. Warhol never explicitly stated his reason for including the witch in his Myths collection, though many believe his decisions were deliberate and meaningful. We can look upon the Myths series as a sort of introspective collection. They inform us on the way Warhol viewed himself in connection with the world around him.

Warhol created his Myths portfolio in 1981 to capture the imaginary characters popular during the 20th century in American popular culture. Most of the images in this portfolio are taken from 1950s television or old Hollywood films. In his Myths portfolio, Warhol takes these recognizable characters and portrays them in the eccentric fashion he used for all his images. They are brightly colored and some are also inlaid with diamond dust. Myths is one of the most sought after Warhol series.

Warhol created his Myths portfolio in 1981 to capture the imaginary characters popular during the 20th century in American popular culture. Most of the images in this portfolio are taken from 1950s television or old Hollywood films. In his Myths portfolio, Warhol takes these recognizable characters and portrays them in the eccentric fashion he used for all his images. They are brightly colored and some are also inlaid with diamond dust. Myths is one of the most sought after Warhol series.

The Shadow 267 is one of ten screen prints from the Myths (1981) portfolio by Andy Warhol. Warhol is best known for his celebrity portraits featuring the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and more. The Myths collection, however, diverges from Warhol’s traditional work, showcasing various fictional characters that exist only in our fears and fantasies. These characters originate from the pages of our beloved bedtime stories and allegorical tales, as well as our favorite films and television shows. Some are great heroes, others the evilest of villains; some possess supernatural abilities, while others reside in an entirely separate universe; the common thread is that none of them adhere to reality. Still, the portfolio remains aligned with the artist’s fixation on fame and stardom, as the subjects of these prints are icons integral to 20th-century American popular culture. One of the ten prints is unlike the rest: Warhol uses an image of himself to make The Shadow 267.

The Shadow 267 fuses two of Warhol’s most consistent themes: the cult of celebrity and self-image and identity. Warhol portrays himself as “The Shadow,” a masked vigilante fighting crime in 1930s New York—the protagonist of an American radio program that operated from 1937 to 1954. The print depicts a double portrait: an image of the artist staring blankly to the side, his lips parted, while his elongated shadow looms ominously behind him. His face appears on the right in washes of deep red, striking but occupying only one-third of the portrait, while his dark silhouette blankets the rest of the frame. The harsh line dividing the two figures further accentuates the distinction between Warhol and his shadow, almost as if his sense of self were split into two halves—one half rendered in a warm red, while the other in a barren grey. Warhol’s signature can be seen in pencil in the lower right corner.

It is said that Warhol considered each of the Myths characters to embody specific attributes of his personality. The artist never explicitly stated the deeper meaning behind the work, but some speculate that the dramatic shadow represents his mysterious and enigmatic public persona, countered against his inner self. Like the radio crime-fighter who adopts numerous identities, Warhol conceals his true nature from the public. Although he does not wear The Shadow’s signature cloak or broad-rimmed hat, Warhol inserts himself into his pantheon of American icons with Shadow 267.

Queen Beatrix 340 by Andy Warhol is a striking portrait from the artist’s 1985 Reigning Queens series. While the Pop artist displayed an open fascination with celebrity throughout his career, he also focused on political figures like Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon and Jackie Kennedy. No one of influence was off the table. This time, Warhol chose to draw attention to women in power. In addition to Queen Beatrix, this collection includes Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland. Though he believed few Americans would identify with the series, Warhol’s attraction towards royalty was an extension of his study of fame.

At two years old, “Trix” Wilhelmina Armgard fled from the Netherlands with her family to evade Nazi occupation. After World War II ended in 1945, they were finally able to return to their home country. In 1961 Beatrix graduated from Leiden University, where she attained a degree in politics. However, she would not take the throne until her mother Juliana abdicated in 1980. At the time of her coronation there was a great deal of unrest among Dutch citizens due to the exorbitant cost of the event. Nevertheless, Beatrix eventually gained the respect of her people and became an exceptionally popular queen. Warhol’s Queen Beatrix 340 shows the monarch at the start of her rule; when he created the print, she was only a few years into her reign.

Beatrix remains one of the richest royals in the world. This was not something Warhol would miss as he often spoke about a love of money himself. Consequently, Queen Beatrix 340 magnifies the queen’s opulence and wealth. In this print Warhol colored her skin pale blue, a shade that matched her jewels. Blocks of pink, yellow and lime green frame Beatrix’s face, her expression one of poise and composure. In the press photo, Beatrix aims her gaze directly at the camera, donning a confident smile. However, what stands out most is the silver crown atop the ruler’s head. The ornate accessories she wears symbolize her prestige, and through them Warhol accentuated her status, glamour and strength.

Warhol was disappointed in the opening of his Reigning Queens series, calling it “lowdown and tacky.” “[The prints] were supposed to be only for Europe—nobody here cares about royalty and it’ll just be another bad review,” he lamented in his diary. Warhol’s observation is somewhat surprising considering that four years prior to the release of his portfolio, Diana Spencer was crowned Princess of Wales. Her worldwide popularity in the 1980’s inspired a fascination with royalty in America that remains to this day. Therefore, the Reigning Queens screen prints continued to gain recognition over time. In 2012, Queen Elizabeth even obtained one of Warhol’s portraits of her for England’s official Royal Collection.

Queen Beatrix 340 embodies a moment in time marked by the reign of empowered women. Warhol’s work in this series represents a high point in his career and highlights the artist’s interest in celebrity beyond the shores of America.

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark by Andy Warhol is a series of 4 screenprints from the artist’s Reigning Queens portfolio published in 1985. The full portfolio also includes Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Queen Margrethe was born on April 16th, 1940, and took the throne in January of 1972 after the passing of her father, Frederick IX, and is still in power today. When she succeeded her father, she became the first ruling queen of denmark since 1412. As of Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September of 2022, Queen Margrethe is currently the only queen regnant in Europe.

Although we usually think of Warhol as a portraitist of rock stars, actresses, and ‘celebrities,’ Reigning Queens is hardly the artist’s only foray into the images of global leaders. In fact, by painting portraits of people who we don’t often think of as celebrities in the traditional sense, Warhol was able to expand his generation’s perception of the concept of celebrity itself—allowing the term to encompass athletes, presidents, businesses men and women, and global figures. Like the Queens, some of Warhol’s politically-natured works include Mao, Vote McGovern, the DNC-commissioned Jimmy Carter portraits, and the Lenin portfolio. In Reigning Queens, Warhol chose to represent women monarchs in an eloquent way, presenting them in a manner that highlights their mystique and powerful femininity,

Warhol wasn’t interested in showing this series in America. In fact, he became angry with George Mulder, a print publisher, for showing the portfolio. Warhol expressed his frustration in his diary. “I had my opening at Leo Castelli’s to go to, of the Reigning Queens portfolio that I just hate George Mulder for showing here in America. They were supposed to be only for Europe—nobody here cares about royalty and it’ll be another bad review” (1985).

Even though the subjects in this series are royalty, Warhol presents them as celebrities similar to his other works. Fame, power, and glamour all fascinated Warhol in a similar way. By using bold colors, Warhol effectively delivers his pop-art treatment to a group of royal women. Furthermore, his color blocking places emphasis on the characteristics (such as their elegant jewelry) that evoke the Queens’ powerful opulence and prestige.

Warhol’s use of colorful “patches” in the Queen Margrethe II and the other prints in the portfolio demonstrate a recurring style in the evolution of his design in the 1970s and 1980s. The portraits contains some visual elements of collage, which can also be seen in the artist’s Mick Jagger and Ladies and Gentlemen portfolios. Moreover, in Queen Margrethe 342, 344, and 345, the patches seem to be intentionally placed to bring our attention to the queen’s jewelry.

Warhol also draws our attention up to the Queen’s hair, emphasizing the tidy and perfect nature of her appearance. Ultimately, our eyes are led to the crown itself. The crown is the most evident detail in all the portraits of Reigning Queens, separating the women from other celebrities he has printed and canonizing them as powerful monarchs who rule over nations.

Andy Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II 334 is a screenprint included in his Reigning Queens portfolio. Warhol completed the series in 1985, just two years before his death. As one of his largest portfolios, Reigning Queens contains 16 prints, depicting four different monarchs of the time (although the edition size is one of his smallest). The series includes Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Warhol later produced a “Royal Edition” of Reigning Queens, which incorporates diamond dust to give the prints a sparkly effect.

To create the portfolio, Warhol used the official photograph released to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Photographer Peter Grugen took the Queen’s portrait at Windsor Castle in 1975. Official portraits of monarchs like those Warhol used for this series often appear on currency and stamps, once again evoking the artist’s fascination for mass production and repetition. After using a photograph for the screen print, Warhol overlaid abstract blocks of color, similar to his collage-like Mick Jagger series. Using the silkscreen method, he was also able to highlight the queens’ jewelry, emphasizing their royal standing. These portraits are large and filled with extravagant colors, reflecting society’s view of the queens.

Warhol was know for his studies of consumerism and celebrities, such as the ultra famous Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe series. However, he found great inspiration in global figures and political leaders as well. Along with queens, he created images of figures like Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Jimmy Carter, and even Alexander the Great. More specifically, feminine power entranced Warhol. Reigning Queens thus combines a number of his fascinations. His other stunning portraits of female figures include Jacqueline Kennedy, Karen Kain, Greta Garbo, and various Drag Queens.

Warhol originally created Reigning Queens for the UK, and fussed about the showing in America in his diary. “I had my opening at Leo Castelli’s to go to, of the Reigning Queens portfolio that I just hate George Mulder for showing here in America. [It was] supposed to be only for Europe—nobody here cares about royalty and it’ll be another bad review.”

Queen Elizabeth II 334 showcases Warhol’s coveted silkscreen technique at the height of his skill, maintaining collage-like elements and intricate detailing. It is thus a supreme example of Warhol’s artistry and technique. In 2012, the Royal Collection purchased prints of Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate her 60 years on the throne. They are the only portraits of herself that Queen Elizabeth owned for which she did not pose for. These prints seemed to bring Warhol one step closer to his ultimate wish: “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England.”

Queen Elizabeth II 335 by Andy Warhol is one of sixteen prints in the Reigning Queens series. Warhol debuted this collection two years before his death in 1985, featuring four female monarchs. All of the queens in the portfolio hold power in their own right, rather than obtaining it through marriage. The four queens include Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, and above, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. The collection depicts Warhol’s fascination with royalty, feminine power, and global figures.

The photos used in this collection were official or media photographs of the monarchs. For Queen Elizabeth II, Warhol chose the official photograph released for her Silver Jubilee in 1977, taken by Peter Grugeon in 1975. Warhol used the same photo for four prints of the queen, though each varies in color and composition.

In Queen Elizabeth II 335, the silkscreened portrait uses a contrasting purple background to draw attention to the queen’s vibrant green dress. The image features abstract blocks of color which Warhol printed from separate screens. For Warhol, silk screening was a trademark technique that serves as the heartbeat of his work. This technique allowed Warhol to easily reproduce images over and over. In this collection Warhol prints four portraits each queen, creating a total of 16 prints. Reigning Queens is thus one of Warhol’s larger series in terms of portfolio size, although the edition size is rather small, making them especially intriguing to collectors.

Warhol seemed to obsess over the concept of repetition and mass production. The repetitive nature of his prints symbolizes the idea of manufacturing and the large-scale production of celebrity imagery in media. Working through this philosophy, Warhol dubbed his art studio “The Factory,” and sought to produce art at a commercial level of output. Additionally, the photographs that Warhol used for the basis of the series are all official state portraits, which are heavily mass produced—appearing on objects like coins, stamps, and state seals.

Another common theme found throughout Warhol’s work is the topic of celebrities and money. The glamorous life of celebrities–and the constant attention they received in the media–fascinated Warhol. Not only did he find inspiration through the lives of celebrities, but through political figures as well. The Reigning Queens series is one of the many politically-focused series he created throughout his career. Other political subjects he depicted include John F. Kennedy and Vladimir Lenin. Furthermore, Warhol was asked to create a portrait for President Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976.

Warhol was often influenced by women of power in his art, whether it be political power or fame and luxury. He created many portraits of famous women, including his extremely popular Marilyn Monroe series. Similarly, his collection of Marylin Monroe portraits feature a basic image of the well-known figure transformed by bright colors. Warhol often glamorized the women in his prints by adding detailed colors which represent colorful makeup. In Queen Elizabeth II 335, Warhol chose a stunning pink color for the subject’s lips which stand out against her pale skin. Warhol also adds blue detailing around the eyes which creates an effect of bold blue eyeliner on the subject.

Queen Elizabeth II: 336 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint included in the Reigning Queens portfolio from 1985. The collection contains four prints each of the four female monarchs at the time including Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, and above, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. For the basis of the Queen Elizabeth prints, Warhol used a photograph taken by Peter Grugeon at Windsor Castle in 1975; the same photo was released in 1977 to announce her Silver Jubilee.

This print in particular displays Queen Elizabeth’s female power with a strikingly bold hot pink background. This background emphasizes her empowering accessories: the gold tiara, necklace, and earrings. In Reigning Queens, Warhol continues to bring life to simplistic images, as he does with ordinary photographs, or common objects like Campbell’s Tomato Soup.

The idea of celebrities and political leaders enthralled Warhol. He created many screenprints of well-known female figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. Besides the four queens, Warhol created portraits of many other political leaders such as John F. Kennedy, Mao Zedong, and his portrait of Jimmy Carter for his presidential campaign.

While Warhol seemed vastly interested in the lives of celebrities, he too wanted to become famous. Warhol once expressed his wishes of becoming “as famous as the Queen of England”. To celebrate her 60th year on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II bought four prints of Warhol’s portraits of her. They are the only portraits she owns in which she did not pose directly for the artwork.

The four Queen Elizabeth II prints show a variety of colors and shapes, leading some collectors to favor certain editions over others. Warhol used his layered screen printing technique to add meticulous details, such as the outlines and the blocks of bright colors. The abstract light pink blocks add another piece of elegance to the print as a whole. Meanwhile, the vibrant background draws the viewer’s attention to the Queen’s deep blue eyes and her light blue sachet. Warhol appropriately chose certain feminine colors to symbolize the Queen’s power and royalty. Overall, the Reigning Queens series strongly evokes Warhol’s fascination for both fame, and feminine power.

In the same year, Warhol created a “Royal Edition” of the Reigning Queen’s series, featuring diamond dust. This added the ultimate Andy Warhol touch to the prints, further emphasizing the beauty and power of the four queens.

Queen Elizabeth II 337 is a screen print by Andy Warhol completed in 1985. The portrait depicts one of the four monarchs in Andy Warhol’s Reigning Queens collection. This series contains four portraits of each four monarchs at the time, including Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

This collection debuted in 1985 and became Warhol’s largest series in terms of portfolio size, published two years before his death in February 1987. In Queen Elizabeth II 337, the bright blue surrounding the queen emphasizes her strength and empowerment. The gradient change from bold blue to white gracefully draws one’s attention to the Queen’s white dress and soft pale skin.

Like many of Warhol’s works, he created these prints with the silkscreen method, which he favored for its reproductive reliability and precise results. In this portrait, Warhol chooses to outline the queen’s hair and crown in red, allowing the viewer’s eyes to focus on her bright face. Further, the red outlines emphasize the Queen’s eyes in the center of the picture.

Celebrity and fame fascinated Warhol, who had a specific love for female power. Notably, all four monarchs of this series obtained the throne due to birthright as opposed to marrying into royalty. Warhol often created images that evoke powerful feminine energy, such as Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and various Drag Queens. Here, Warhol takes a unique approach by using royalty as his inspiration. He thus confronts his audience with a powerful image of female authority.

Warhol initially created the collection for the UK, and fussed about the showing in America in his diary. “I had my opening at Leo Castelli’s to go to, of the Reigning Queens portfolio that I just hate George Mulder for showing here in America. [It was] supposed to be only for Europe—nobody here cares about royalty and it’ll be another bad review”.

Along with royalty, Warhol found interest in other global figures, often political leaders. We see this in his portraits of Nixon, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. For all of Warhol’s Queens portraits, he used official media photographs. These state portraits appeared on stamps and currency, evoking Warhol’s fascination for mass-production and the repetitive nature of images and objects in modern society. The photograph, taken by Peter Grugeon at Windsor Castle on April 2nd, 1975, was used for the announcement of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.

Queen Elizabeth II 337 showcases Warhol’s coveted silkscreen layering technique, which (by the 1980s) he had mastered, allowing him to create more and more detailed and price designs. It is thus a supreme example of Warhol’s artistry and technique. In 2012, the Royal Collection purchased Warhol’s prints of Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate her 60 years on the throne (they are the only portraits owned by the Royal Collection which the Queen did not directly pose for). The series seemed to bring Warhol one step closer to his ultimate wish: “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England.”

Shoes 255 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from his 1980 Shoes portfolio. The portfolio recalls his early work as a commercial fashion illustrator for companies and publications like Glamour, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Specifically, he created dozens of shoe illustrations for I. Miller & Sons between 1955 and 1957, when he worked as their only illustrator. One may consider Shoes to be a re-imagination of his early shoe designs that predate his stardom. In general, the portfolio is a continuation of his subtle fetish for women’s shoes and their delicacy.

In Warhol’s diary, we can read about the very day he set out to buy the shoes used in this series. “Went out and bought props for drawings (fruit $23.80). Got a load of 1950s used shoes down on Canal Street for $2 a pair. It’s just the shoes I used to draw, all the Herbert Levine shoes with the creative lasts. Shoes first got really pointy in ’54–55, and then they got round in ’57″ (Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett. The Andy Warhol Diaries). Warhol and his assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, photographed the shoes disarranged on the studio floor. Taken by the appearance of the dispersed shoes, Warhol decided to use the photos as the basis for the series.

In Shoes 255, Warhol depicts the heeled shoes in a monochromatic color pallet with shoes featured diagonally across the canvas. This work, in particular, differs from other screenprints within the Shoes portfolio, which feature shoes portrayed in vibrant colors. In Shoes 255, the shoes are depicted in white while the shadow and background are black, creating a stark contrast. Shoes 255 is among many works in the portfolio that feature a unique technique in which Warhol uses diamond dust to create a shimmer-like effect. Warhol incorporated the diamond dust technique into the portfolio after finding inspiration from Rupert Jansen Smith, who was also a major assistant of Warhol’s. Smith used industrial-grade ground-up stones to create the diamond dust effect in his screenprints. Unlike Smith, Warhol opted to use pulverized glass to create the diamond dust effect.

Another except in Andy’s diary reads: “[Rupert Jasen Smith] tried to be artistic and he sure was, he sure was. This is the Shoes with the diamond dust. He had them completely finished, with the diamond dust on and everything. I don’t know why he did that. I’m doing shoes because I’m going back to my roots. In fact, I think maybe I should do nothing but (laughs) shoes from now on.”

Shoes 255, along with the complete Shoes portfolio, merges Warhol’s interest in commercial commodities, excess, and opulence. The screenprints are symbolic of growing trends in fashion and pop culture, as well as Andy’s own fascination for shoes and feet. The Shoes portfolio contains FS II.253-257.

Shoes 256 by Andy Warhol is one of five screenprints from the artist’s Shoes portfolio. Long before the soup cans, the Marilyns, or the Taylors, Warhol harbored a serious fascination for shoes (especially women’s heels). This fascination was both intimate and reflective of his willingness to embrace all things American; in this case the display windows that seductively presented colorful stilettos to him when he first arrived in New York City. When Warhol returned to his beloved shoes in 1980, he had transformed from a hustling commercial illustrator to the biggest artist in the world (albeit without giving up the commercial tag).

If one didn’t look close enough, Shoes 256 could almost be mistaken for a portrait of people, validating the surprising relatable quality of the image. Warhol loved drawing shoes, and he translated this fascination into his early success in advertising. In Shoes 256 and related prints, Warhol invites us to see what shoes can tell us about the people who wear them, and even where they go beyond one’s foot. Each print shows scattered shoes or high heels, and although some of the prints are very different in their emotional and aesthetic qualities, they all stem from Warhol’s trademark approach to repetition.

Shoes 256 comes after the deluxe edition shoes series. The print is almost completely black, making the viewer feel like they are seeing shoes in a secret area such as a drawer or under a bed. The darker pieces offer some insight into how Warhol’s imagination transposed shoes away from the wearer into more interesting and sometimes risque areas. Additionally, perhaps Shoes 256 provides commentary on the commercialization of intimacy and its association with femininity and high fashion in pop culture.

Warhol’s narrative in his 1977 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is telling in this respect. For instance, when the character “B” says: “it’s better to see their clothes hanging on their chairs than on their bodies. Everybody should just have all their clothes hanging out. Nothing should be hidden except the things you don’t want your mother to see.” The clothes look best hanging, presumably because they were made with the purpose of looking good in a display case. The same logic can be extrapolated to other economic spheres, but one could argue that it represents an idea present in many of Warhol’s works.

The idea for the series (as it often turned out at The Factory as well as in his other commissioned works) was suggested to him by someone else, yet mysteriously it was Warhol’s idea all along. One comes away from Shoes 256 feeling that either one has been let in on some great secret about shoes, or that one has been betrayed about the possibility of a shoe being meaningful at all. Whereas Warhol’s more colorful Shoes prints display a classic Pop Art approach, the black and white prints such as Shoes 256 and 252 evoke a more sensual and mysterious approach to footwear.

Some members of Warhol’s entourage have said that he was forced to tone down the more personal aspects of his work at the beginning of his career, partly due to homophobia and pretension in the art world. This, by default, extended to his shoe fetishism. As such, Shoes 256 holds a special place in Warhol’s oeuvre as a perfect combination of narcissistic ambition, commercial opportunism, and the thoughtful reflection that characterizes Warhol’s influence on American society.

Shoes 257 is a classic Andy Warhol masterpiece from the 1980 Shoes portfolio. After years of artistic exploration and growth in fields of writing, music, and visual art, Warhol gained a massive following. However, laid in the groundwork of his Shoes series is an homage to his life history before fame. Shoes opens a window into his humble beginnings as a commercial illustrator of footwear during the 1950’s. As a longtime enthusiast of women’s footwear specifically, Shoes 257 is a passion project commemorating Warhol’s pre-celebrity life, dusted in the glamorous lens that he saw when looking at women’s shoes.

Shoes 257 consists of an array of women’s high heel shoes that are pointed upward and placed in an nonlinear line. The print is fairly understated (especially for Warhol), when it comes to color: dark black, rusty orange, gray, and royal blue juxtapose the colorful bright teal shoe in the center, diverging from the black background. Diamond dust softens the non-descript dark background, adding texture and a touch of elegance that glamorizes these already attractive shoes. Shoes 257 is one of the more refined compositions in Shoes, albeit less color driven than works like Shoes 254 and less randomized than Shoes 253. Shoes ultimately resonate with the class and elegance of women’s high heel shoes because of it’s uniform composition and understated forms.

Warhol’s stylistic decision to add darker shoes, like black and rust, on an already black canvas works like the support a shoe offers a lady’s foot; they instead offer support to the main eye-catching colors through juxtaposition and, in turn, brighten them even more. In true Warholian fashion, the composition in Shoes 257 is both bold and complex. The composition draws the eye towards smaller details beyond colors and shape. Some of these details, such as the name “Tony” printed on the inside heel of the royal blue shoe, reflect Warhol’s fascination with mass production and consumerism. Even though this touch separates this shoe from the others, such a detail calls to mind both Warhol’s fascination with advertisement and his origins as a commercial artist.

Aside from Warhol’s self-proclamation as a “business artist,” the series remains personal because he both screen printed his own designs and added diamond dust that can only be tangibly experienced in the hands of this work alone. The 1980’s were one of the boldest and most colorful decades in fashion history, yet Shoes 257 finds a way to antagonize the trendy neons and pastels that were duly customary to mass-produced fashion and his earlier works.

Thirty years after having worked in the fashion industry, Warhol returns to his roots and creates Shoes 257 as a tribute to his past. The series’ modest colors and refined composition allowed Warhol to shine in a new light and trend-set in the next era.

The Skulls complete portfolio is a set of 4 screenprints by Andy Warhol. Skulls is a mesmerizing journey into the human condition, confronting us with the inescapable reality of mortality. Published in 1976, this series is a departure from Warhol’s earlier works, which often focused on celebrity and consumer culture.

The Skulls portfolio is based on object photographs taken by Andy Warhol’s assistant, Ronnie Cutrone. Using intricate play of light and shadow, Warhol creates a tension that beckons viewers into a contemplation of their own mortality. The portfolio consists of four prints, each featuring different color combinations that breathe life into the age-old theme of death. The vibrant hues of red, yellow, blue, and purple stand in stark contrast to the macabre subject matter, creating a thought-provoking juxtaposition.

This series signifies a pivotal shift in Warhol’s career, possibly influenced by his near-fatal shooting in 1968. By employing the skull as a motif, Warhol evokes the traditional genre of vanitas and confronts viewers with the inevitability of death. This significant body of work also showcases his ongoing exploration of the still life genre in the 1970s, which includes his Hammer and Sickle (1976), Gems (1978), Grapes (1979) and Space Fruit (1979) portfolios. Departing from the conventions of still life painting, yet using its traditional props, Warhol challenges preconceived notions of the genre. He employs color blocking techniques and abstract elements, transforming the subject matter into visually captivating compositions.

In contrast to Warhol’s iconic 1960s celebrity prints, which captured the essence of famous personalities through their defining features, the Skulls series shifts focus to a subject that lacks individual characteristics. Intriguingly, this Pop Art exploration of mortality echoes Warhol’s earlier musings on consumer goods, such as Coca-Cola. Just as anyone, regardless of their financial status, can purchase an ideal can of Coke, the Skull series reminds us that beneath our unique exteriors, we all share the same skeletal structure and the same inevitable fate.

The Skulls portfolio exemplifies Warhol’s ability to transform familiar subjects into captivating works that challenge our perceptions and provoke deep introspection. Through the use of vivid colors and intricate play of light and shadow, Warhol brings a modern perspective to the traditional vanitas genre. This series offers both collectors and art enthusiasts an opportunity to explore Warhol’s evolving artistic focus and his nuanced approach to universal themes like mortality. It stands as a compelling example of how Warhol continually challenged artistic norms and expanded the boundaries of Pop Art.

Like that of the Grapes series and Space Fruit: Lemons, Space Fruit: Oranges showcases Warhol’s signature techniques of screenprinting. During the 70s, Warhol began relying on shadowing and hand drawn lines more heavily in his still life portraits. Warhol adds color to the oranges in pairs; two in orange, two in the screen of the teal color block, and the last pair in simple black and white. With this, he adds more shadowing than seen in the Grapes and Space Fruit: Lemons. By adding a modern touch to his screenprints of conventional objects, Warhol guided his audience to notice the overlooked materials in daily life.

Space Fruit: Oranges 197 by Andy Warhol as Part of his Larger Body of Work
Andy Warhol created his portfolios entitled Space Fruit in 1978, which derives from the traditional practice of the still life portrait. This type of representation, in which the artist depicts typically inanimate objects relating to everyday life (i.e. fruit, silverware, flowers, and insects). This artistic tradition traces its origins to ancient Greek and Roman art, but gained prominence in the fifteenth century in Northern Europe. Warhol alludes to this tradition with his portfolio of Space Fruits, a more classical subject-matter that illustrates Warhol’s knowledge of the history upon which his artwork was founded.

Space Fruit: Pears 203 by Andy Warhol exemplifies his modern approach to the still life genre. With its bright colors of green and pink, Warhol demonstrates more interest in the drawing’s vibrancy than its realism. His use of shadow and detailed lines on the pears gives the fruit more of a realistic quality as they become more 3-Dimensional. With the help of printer, Rubert Jasen Smith, Warhol was able to complete his Space Fruit series in 1979.

This series marks a shift of Warhol’s interest from commercial products to art historical subjects. Warhol takes the same approach to his Space Fruit series as he does to his Flowers and Skulls series, taking traditional props and isolating each element in some of his most famous portfolios. The use of color and abstract composition throughout the series displays an almost cubist approach to art––taking something familiar and presenting it in a different light. Each subject in the portfolio is almost recognizable as the fruit being portrayed; however, they become more abstract and obscured throughout the series, making the viewer wonder if the subject is even fruit at all.

Andy Warhol’s Sunset project, created in 1972, is a collection of screenprints based off of several reels of sunset photographs shot in East Hampton, San Francisco, and New York. Warhol’s film is called Sunset, and it is one of the fifty films that has been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. Each sunset image contains different colors thus evoking a different sensation based upon the colors. Each print in the Sunset series is unique, as they are all based off of different stills from Sunset.

The Sunset series was produced in 1972 on smooth wove paper. This series is an extreme example of the concept of color serialization. The screenprint was produced at an unheard of 472 unique color variations with the use of only three screens. The Sunset series is considered to be one of Warhol’s more expressive projects he produced in his lifetime. The commission for the work was made by Johnson & Burgee, famed architects, to be installed in the rooms of the renovated Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Andy Warhol’s Sunset project, created in 1972, is a collection of screenprints based off of several reels of sunset photographs shot in East Hampton, San Francisco, and New York. Warhol’s film is called Sunset, and it is one of the fifty films that has been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. Each sunset image contains different colors thus evoking a different sensation based upon the colors. Each print in the Sunset series is unique, as they are all based off of different stills from Sunset.

The Sunset series was produced in 1972 on smooth wove paper. This series is an extreme example of the concept of color serialization. The screenprint was produced at an unheard of 472 unique color variations with the use of only three screens. The Sunset series is considered to be one of Warhol’s more expressive projects he produced in his lifetime. The commission for the work was made by Johnson & Burgee, famed architects, to be installed in the rooms of the renovated Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Andy Warhol’s Sunset 88 (Unique), created in 1972, is a screenprint based off of several reels of sunset photographs shot in East Hampton, San Francisco, and New York. Warhol’s film is called Sunset, and it is one of the fifty films that has been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. Each sunset image contains different colors thus evoking a different sensation based upon the colors. This particular Sunset screen print depicts a orange, green and blue background with a yellow sun. Each print in the Sunset portfolio is unique, as they are all based off of different stills from Sunset.

SUNSET 88 (UNIQUE) BY ANDY WARHOL AS PART OF HIS LARGER BODY OF WORK
The Sunset series was produced in 1972 on smooth wove paper. This series is an extreme example of the concept of color serialization. The screenprint was produced at an unheard of 472 unique color variations with the use of only three screens. The sunset series is considered to be one of Warhol’s more expressive projects he produced in his lifetime. The commission for the work was made by Johnson & Burgee, famed architects, to be installed in the rooms of the renovated Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After the prints were removed from the hotel, they were signed, numbered and stamped.

Franz Kafka, the inspiration of Franz Kafka 226, is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and of the absurdism genre. Kafka is famous for both short stories and novels, with much of his work published posthumously, despite his wishes for his work to be burned and unread. Some of his most famous works include The Trial and The Metamorphosis. Kafka's work became so influential that it inspired the creation of the word "Kafkaesque," when something evokes similar themes or scenarios that appeared in Kafka's writings. Warhol’s take on Kafka’s image uses a realistic quality in the portrait, while overlaying it with muted greens and blues and shading that accentuates his features, such as his eyebrows and ears, like that of a caricature.

Franz Kafka 226 is a part of Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century. Warhol was prolific in his works depicting celebrities and was well known for his fascination with fame. It is noted that Warhol's portraiture tends to reveal only the surface of a subject, just their image. In this series of portraits, the type of celebrity Warhol deals with is not so glamorous or typical of his usual pick of movie or rock stars. Each portrait is of a very influential figure in either the arts, sciences, or law.

Gertrude Stein, the influence behind Warhol’s Gertrude Stein 227, was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays that eschewed the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century literature. Stein was also known to be a fervent collector of Modernist art. She was born in West Allegheny Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California. She moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. For some forty years, the Stein home at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank of Paris was a renowned Saturday evening gathering place for both expatriate American artists and writers and others noteworthy in the world of vanguard arts and letters, most notably Pablo Picasso. Entrance into the Stein salon was a sought-after validation, and Stein became combination mentor, critic, and guru to those who gathered around her, including Ernest Hemingway who described the salon in A Moveable Feast.

Gertrude Stein 227 is a part of Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century. Warhol was prolific in his works depicting celebrities and was well known for his fascination with fame. It is noted that Warhol’s portraiture tends to reveal only the surface of a subject, just their image. In this series of portraits, the type of celebrity Warhol deals with is not so glamorous or typical of his usual pick of movie or rock stars. Each portrait is of a very influential figure in either the arts, sciences, or law.