Andy Warhol Watches 1961 water-based paint on cotton duck 180.3 x 122.6 cm (70 7/8 x 48 1/4 in)
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Frederick W. Hughes, New York Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Sotheby’s, New York, ‘Contemporary Art, Evening’, 10 May 2005, lot 65 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner Exhibited New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol Drawings & Related Works 1951–1986, 13 February – 22 March 2003 Literature Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures Volume1: 1961–1963, New York, 2002, cat. no. 26, p. 42 (illustrated in colour) Andy Warhol Drawings & Related Works 1951–1986, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2003, p. 88 (illustrated in colour) Catalogue Essay “Buying is more American than thinking, and I’m as American as they come.” ANDY WARHOL The Spring of 1961, the year in which Watches was made, was a significant moment in Andy Warhol’s career and in the history of 20th-century art. This was when Andy Warhol left his successful job as a commercial illustrator for various magazines in New York and took his first steps towards being an independent artist. Watches symbolises this pivotal moment in Warhol’s career as an artist. While his subjects remain in the world of consumption and mass production, we can see the artist moving away in this painting from his own pictorial language towards the mass visual language of American society. Suddenly Americans saw everyday objects such as watches, vacuum cleaners, TVs and, later, Campbell’s soup cans, as if for the first time. These objects, as enlarged, twodimensional and repeated images, were totally familiar yet visually arresting. A startlingly fresh way of seeing the world was established. “Once you ‘got’ pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again.” (Andy Warhol from Popism: The Warhol ’60s) Warhol used an opaque projector to enlarge the Watches advertisement clipping, published just once in the Sunday Daily News on 26 March 1961, onto the canvas. Working freehand, he reproduced the projection on the canvas without the help of a pencil under drawing. A fragmented part of the advertisement’s general heading is placed on the top of the painting, with the words “OF VALUE”, as well as the incomplete word “WATCHES”, which appeared over the right-hand side of a two-page spread. Compared with other works of the series, Watches stands out for its clean layout and minimal graphic intervention. In January of 1958, Warhol had seen Jasper Johns’s first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Johns appropriated popular American iconography such as the flag, target and numbers as the imagery of his paintings, which in turn Warhol appropriated for his own early works. Benjamin Buchloh has written that “Warhol’s dialogue with Rauschenberg’s work finds parallel in his critical revisions of the legacy of Jasper Johns By contrast, his own new mass-cultural iconography of consumption and the portraits of collective scopic prostitution looked just suddenly more specific, more concretely American than the American flag itself.” (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s one-dimensional art: 1956–1966’, in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 51) Watches marked a time of great significance in Warhol’s working methods. This unique work was made shortly before Warhol started using his trademark silkscreens. The strong pictorial emphasis of both Watches and the rest of the Newspaper Advertisements series, prefigure the graphic sensibility of the silkscreen technique that would eventually lift images of consumer products from the trivial to the exceptional and beautiful. Only a year after Watches, Warhol exhibited the now iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in July 1962. These small canvas works of everyday objects created a sensation in the art world, bringing both Warhol and Pop art into the nati
Andy Warhol Watches 1961 water-based paint on cotton duck 180.3 x 122.6 cm (70 7/8 x 48 1/4 in)
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Frederick W. Hughes, New York Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Sotheby’s, New York, ‘Contemporary Art, Evening’, 10 May 2005, lot 65 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner Exhibited New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol Drawings & Related Works 1951–1986, 13 February – 22 March 2003 Literature Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures Volume1: 1961–1963, New York, 2002, cat. no. 26, p. 42 (illustrated in colour) Andy Warhol Drawings & Related Works 1951–1986, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2003, p. 88 (illustrated in colour) Catalogue Essay “Buying is more American than thinking, and I’m as American as they come.” ANDY WARHOL The Spring of 1961, the year in which Watches was made, was a significant moment in Andy Warhol’s career and in the history of 20th-century art. This was when Andy Warhol left his successful job as a commercial illustrator for various magazines in New York and took his first steps towards being an independent artist. Watches symbolises this pivotal moment in Warhol’s career as an artist. While his subjects remain in the world of consumption and mass production, we can see the artist moving away in this painting from his own pictorial language towards the mass visual language of American society. Suddenly Americans saw everyday objects such as watches, vacuum cleaners, TVs and, later, Campbell’s soup cans, as if for the first time. These objects, as enlarged, twodimensional and repeated images, were totally familiar yet visually arresting. A startlingly fresh way of seeing the world was established. “Once you ‘got’ pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again.” (Andy Warhol from Popism: The Warhol ’60s) Warhol used an opaque projector to enlarge the Watches advertisement clipping, published just once in the Sunday Daily News on 26 March 1961, onto the canvas. Working freehand, he reproduced the projection on the canvas without the help of a pencil under drawing. A fragmented part of the advertisement’s general heading is placed on the top of the painting, with the words “OF VALUE”, as well as the incomplete word “WATCHES”, which appeared over the right-hand side of a two-page spread. Compared with other works of the series, Watches stands out for its clean layout and minimal graphic intervention. In January of 1958, Warhol had seen Jasper Johns’s first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Johns appropriated popular American iconography such as the flag, target and numbers as the imagery of his paintings, which in turn Warhol appropriated for his own early works. Benjamin Buchloh has written that “Warhol’s dialogue with Rauschenberg’s work finds parallel in his critical revisions of the legacy of Jasper Johns By contrast, his own new mass-cultural iconography of consumption and the portraits of collective scopic prostitution looked just suddenly more specific, more concretely American than the American flag itself.” (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s one-dimensional art: 1956–1966’, in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 51) Watches marked a time of great significance in Warhol’s working methods. This unique work was made shortly before Warhol started using his trademark silkscreens. The strong pictorial emphasis of both Watches and the rest of the Newspaper Advertisements series, prefigure the graphic sensibility of the silkscreen technique that would eventually lift images of consumer products from the trivial to the exceptional and beautiful. Only a year after Watches, Warhol exhibited the now iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in July 1962. These small canvas works of everyday objects created a sensation in the art world, bringing both Warhol and Pop art into the nati
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