Page 14 January, 2016 © Journal of the Print World, 2015. All rights reserved. 1-603-267-7349

From Obscure to Iconic: The Flowers of Andy Warhol

by Robin Starr, Vice PresidentDirector of American & European Works of ArtSkinner, Inc.

Andy Warhol is best known for his iconic subject matter: Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Elvis Presley. His paintings marry these motifs with screenprinting to express the commercial nature of his work; its manufac-ture over its customized production. His printed work encapsulates this same idea, and further heightens a sense of mass-production.

Warhol is often associated with celebrity, but he also had an interest in inanimate objects or still life. The most famous was his Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962. While the cans were hardly traditional still life subjects, they were decontextualized still lifes nonetheless. Warhol’s still life works also featured more traditional subjects, namely flowers. Some of his earli-est florals were featured in his In the Bottom of my Garden of 1956.

In the Bottom of my Garden, was a livre d’artiste depicting putti frolicking and fornicating

in a landscape of giant flowers (fig-ure 1). These works are not strictly still life, as the putti are equal in vi-sual weight to the flowers and often dominate. Here the technique was that of his early work with its blot-ted lines. The images were then hand-colored by Warhol and his Factory friends. They reference the consumer culture by mimicking the techniques Warhol employed for his advertising work. They are cartoon-like and jovial – albeit slightly naughty – but predate Warhol’s signature marriage of screenprinting with painting.

His most famous florals, and by far his most important, were begun in the

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Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Flowers, Suite of Ten Prints

summer of 1964. Warhol had gleaned many of his earliest images from mass media, thus the images of Jackie Kennedy came from the press cover-age of the JFK assassination. His Flowers series also came from printed media, although the source was more obscure. Warhol took the im-age – quite literally – from the magazine Modern Photography. It had been shot by Patricia Caulfield, the magazine’s executive editor, and published in the June 1964 issue.1 Caulfield used the image in a fold-out spread, where multiple versions of the image demonstrated how a new Kodak home color processing system could be used to manipulate color photographs.2

The presentation of the same image in varying colors would have in-stantly appealed to Warhol who ultimately used the image in countless color ways, just as Caulfield had done in the magazine. The original image was rectangular and depicted seven hibiscus blossoms. Warhol cropped and manipulated it into a square composition of four blooms, even cutting, pasting, and rotating one of the blooms to a new position closer to three of its companions. The shift to a square composition allowed him to play with the composition’s very orientation. Warhol also varied the sizes and media used with this composition, but always incorporated his screenprinting technique.

An important aspect of Warhol’s manipulation of Caulfield’s image was to dramatically increase the contract of the image. The result removed all shadows and highlights from the blossoms and turned the leaves and grasses beneath them to a flat pattern. Warhol’s first show at the pres-tigious Leo Castelli Gallery opened in late November of 1964, and fo-cused on the first Flowers paintings (figure 2, above.) David Bourdon, an art critic for the The Village Voice, described Warhol’s Flowers say-ing, “The flowers appear to float against a murky background of wav-ing green grass. They are like cut-out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet’s lily pond.”3

We can’t help but tie the Flowers to the long history of floral still life as Bourdon did. At the same time Warhol’s perspective is utterly new. If the subject matter comes from nature, the colors do not. They are Day-Glo, fluorescent, and neon. They are manufactured. The flattened, unmodelled blossoms only heighten the sense of their fabrication. The juxtaposition of manufactured nature is conspicuously ironic. Warhol is “…showing us mechanical ways of seeing and feeling… [but this is] concealed in blandness. These glossy, floral-patterned paintings look like printed oilcloth, plastic tablecloths, or…wallpaper.4 Even the “original” paintings employ screenprinting, heightening the sense of mechaniza-tion and mass-production. The publication of the Flowers portfolio in 1970 only strengthened the aspect of fabrication, especially when all ten are hung together.

From a contextual perspective, the timing of the selection of the subject of flowers is interesting. It seems simplistic, and it is meant to. It comes just after his Disasters works of 1962-63 and his ill-fated 1964 Thirteen Most Wanted Men to say nothing of the Marilyn and Jackie images – iconic figures of beauty associated with early and untimely deaths.5 This can’t help but connect the flowers to mortality and the funereal; to re-mind the viewer of the transient nature of flowers, youth, and life. This sense is completely undermined by the visual choices Warhol made. The colossal scale of these blooms seems anything but fragile and tran-sient. Their high contrast makes the reproductive organs of stamen and pistil the only recognizable elements of these flowers. This reminds the viewer of the fecundity of flowers;6 not the funereal.

None of the associations conjured by Warhol’s flowers are new or gut-wrenching, but his shift away from celebrity, consumerism, and death is striking. Regardless of what nuanced as-sociations flowers may have to viewers, the sub-ject is largely lacking in narrative or emotion. Mi-chael Lobel makes the case .. continued next page 1 Warhol used Caufield's image without permission, and in 1966, Caufield sued. The two settled out of court, and this changed one of the essentials of Warhol's process. Going forward, his work was based on images he composed and shot himself. In Warhol's defense, Warhol didn't merely steal Caufield's image. He radically manipulated it to create his own image.2 http://www.Interviemagazine.com/art/andy-warhols-flower-power/3 David Bourdon, “Art: Andy Warhol” in The Village Voice, December 3, 1964, volume, number 7, page 11.4 ibid.5 The series was commissioned for the New York World’s Fair. Depicting actual criminal mug shots the piece was censored and over-painted before the public could see it.6 These elements were clearly important to Warhol, as he replaced the center of the blossom he had moved with the center of another flower to make them stand out more clearly.

Andy Warhol, Frontispiece for "In the Bottom of my Garden," c.1956, offset

lithograph with hand-coloring. Image courtesy of Skinner, Inc., Boston

figure 1

Andy Warhol, Three Plates from "Flowers," 1970, color screenprints. Image courtesy of Skinner, Inc., Boston figure 2

Andy Warhol, Lincoln Center Ticket, 1967,

color screenprint. Image courtesy of Skinner, Inc.,

Boston figure 3

Page 15 January, 2016 © Journal of the Print World, 2015. All rights reserved. 1-603-267-7349

for this being a purposeful shift in his “In Transition: Warhol's Flowers” essay of 2012. These flowers are not readily identifiable – Even a botanist would have trouble identify-ing them as hibiscus – and they were certainly not selected because of their Pop icon status. Instead they become iconic because they are created by Warhol. Going forward, Warhol will be drawn to more obscure subjects that become famous when passed through his ar-tistic machine. This will be true in painting, film, and printmaking.

Given the predominance of Abstract Expressionism in the New York art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, it is

unexpected, to say the least, that anyone would consider still life as a viable subject for artistic success. Warhol must have been aware of the import of his first show with the preeminent Leo Castelli. Castelli had rejected Warhol pre-viously. This fact was unlikely to perturb the king of Pop, and the entire show sold out. The flat pattern-like quality of his Flowers recurs in the use of repeated floral silhouettes in works like the cover of Flash – November 22, 1963, 1968, Lincoln Center Ticket, 1967 (figure 3), and SAS Passenger Ticket, 1968. They are a clear reference to their iconic cousins. Warhol returned to floral still life again in 1974 with his print series depicting ikebana arrange-ments, also titled Flowers (figure 4). These are a more traditional approach to still life, showing flowers in vases, and even hint at placement within space. They have little of the manufactured and iconic nature of the Flowers of 10 years prior. The sheer volume of the earlier Flowers he produced turned them into mass-media images. They embodied Warhol. They foreshadowed the flower power movement, and the flower stickers that every hippie of the late 1960s put on their VW Beetles and Fiats.

Specializing in American paintings and prints from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and as Director of American & European Paintings & Prints at Skinner, Inc., Robin Starr is widely regarded as one of Skin-ner’s most vibrant and animated auctioneers, bringing an enthusiastic spirit to the podium. Robin received her M.A. in the History of Art,

specializing in early medieval art from William Coillege.

rstarr@skinnerinc.com Skinner, Inc., 274 Cedar Hill Street, Marlborough, MA 01752

508-970-3000 www.skinnerinc.com

Andy Warhol, Plate from Flow-ers (Black and White), 1974,

color screenprint. Image courtesy of Skinner, Inc., Boston figure 4

TEN YEARS INTHE GILKEY CENTER FOR GRAPHIC ARTS

PORTLAND, OREGON (1993-2003)

continued from page 13

In its inaugural decade, the Friends of the Print Center, renamed the Friends of the Gilkey Center, continued to play a fundamental role. FGC events included a trip to Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Uma-

tilla Indian Reservation for a tour and demonstration by artist and Crow’s Shadow founder James Lavadour. From its founding year the council main-tained the annual practice of commissioning an artist to create an edition of ‘patron prints’ for membership at a given level. Frank Boyden’s Phoenix for Gordon commemorates the driving force and namesake of the Center after Gilkey’s death in 2000 at the age of 88.

By 2000 my position had changed to assistant curator of prints and draw-ings and J.C. Schlechter was hired to take over appointments and the pull-ing of prints. At this time the council initiated the FGC Membership Award, for which we took submissions and granted memberships to emerging printmakers, photographers, and art historians. Around the same time, in 2001 FGC members began taking annual trips to attend the Seattle Print Fair, organized by Sam Davidson, ifpda member and owner of Davidson Galleries.

A final FGC excursion in the inaugural decade was a trip to Oaxaca in 2002, organized by board member Ron Crosier. The council visited a num-ber of printmaking and papermaking studios, ancient archaeological sites, Oaxaca’s Graphic Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. This memorable trip was followed by Gráfica de Mexico, an exhibition that I had the opportunity to curate for the fall of 2002 with an opening celebra-tion and welcome to the new curator of prints, Dr. Annette Dixon. In 2003 we marked the 10-year anniversary of the Center with a retrospective cer-emony to acknowledge a decade of community support and involvement, galvanized around the art of printmaking, viewing, collecting and connois-seurship.

Pamela A. Morris is an art historian with a fo-cus on the history of printmaking. She attend-ed the Université de Poitiers in France and Portland State University, earning a B.A. in art history and French. Morris was assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Portland Art Museum, where she worked from 1984-2004. In 2005 she began a graduate program at Boston University and a graduate intern-ship in the print department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, completing her M.A. in 2007. Morris has taught the history of print-making at Portland State University, is on the staff at Augen Gallery, and works as an inde-pendent exhibition coordinator and consultant. Pamela Morris pamela@oranjstudio.com

Portland Art Museum1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR 97205

503-226-2811 www.PortlandArtMuseum.org

Christy Wyckoff (American, b. 1946)“Invitation,” 1990 Screenprint

8-1/2” x 10” Ed. 75, Image courtesy of the artist, Portland, OR.

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Pamela A. Morris at Jim Riswold exhibition (October, 2015)

Image courtesy of the artist and Augen Gallery, Portland, OR.