One of the immortal images of twentieth-century art, the 24inch Flowers were created in October-November 1964, immediately before Andy Warhol’s first sell-out show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that same year. Having left the Stable Gallery at the height of his creative powers at the end of the previous Gallery season, Warhol was comparatively free during the summer of 1964 to concentrate on preparing work for his inaugural show at Leo Castelli scheduled for November that year. An artist who regularly worked in series, Warhol characteristically preferred to dedicate his gallery exhibitions to a single theme, subject or sequence, as epitomised by the seminal exhibition of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. Warhol’s move to Leo Castelli provided the catalyst for a new set of works whose success was so instantaneous that they all sold immediately and quickly bec👍ame synonymous with the Pop movement which was rapidly gaining international credence.

Warhol appropriated his source image from a colour photograph of seven hibiscus blossoms printed as a fold-out in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography, intended to illustrate the varying visual effect of different exposure times and filter settings. No doubt the seriality of the images held immediate appeal for Warhol, however it was through a sequence of interventions and manipulations– cropping the image and rotating one of the flowers 180 degrees – that Warhol derived his final composition. He particularly liked the square format of the canvases which denied a fixed upright, thereby affording a range of four potential orientations: “I like painting on a square because you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it’s just a square.”(the artist cited in: David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 191)

Although Warhol had been working on the Flowers since the summer, the Castelli inventory reveals that the 24inch canvases were produced last, between September and October, when Warhol had the idea of the show firmly in mind. In the installation at the gallery, it was the 24inch canvases that best exploited the full pictorial potential of the multiple orientations: Warhol arranged twenty-eight of the 24inch Flowers in four rows of seven along the floating wall panel that masked the gallery’s windows on East 77^th Street. Arranging the canvases like tesserae, Warhol elicited subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases, the amorphous curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialising the rectili🐻near grid-like strಌucture created by the gaps between the canvases.

Between June and October 1964, Warhol’s studio – the Factory – became a production line for Flower paintings of different sizes. Throughout this phase of his artistic development, Warhol pioneered, honed and refined the screenprinting process that he had made his own. The first 🃏artist to make extensive use of the still then revolutionary process, Warhol was attracted by its affinity with the mass-producing image-making machines of consumer culture and by its anonymous, luxuriously slick facture which effaced the individual hand of the artist. By removing himself from the creative equation, Warhol sought to communicate more directly and guilelessly in an established currency of exchange that blended high and low culture imagery. Each canvas is made up of three distinct phases: firstly, the forms of the flowers are stencilled, masked and the coloured paints applied by hand onto the primed canvas; once dry, the flowers are masked from the inside and the green acrylic of the surrounding ground is applied with a wide brush in broad swathes, leaving barely discernible traces of the artist’s brush; finally the screenprint image is applied over the dried image. In the present example, we witness a particularly rare colour combination of vibrant yellow and luscious blue flowers – no other work in the catalogue raisonné comprises this unique combination.

The idea to make flowers the subject of a major series was apparently suggested to Warhol by Henry Geldzahler, then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. By choosing to depict the disarmingly innocuous motif of flowers, Warhol was consciously and wilfully engaging with an established canon of still-life painting stretching back to bygone centuries: “With the Flowers, Andy was just trying a different subject matter. In a funny way, he was kind of repeating the history of art. It was like, now we’re doing my Flower period! Like Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers, the genre.” (Gerard Malanga as cited in A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, New York 2003, p. 74).Warhol’s updated interpretation of this age-old motif, however, is consciously banal and synthetic: in the first instance he rejects the intricate and hierarchical compositions of the Dutch still-life tradition in favour of an overhead perspective which banishes the horizon and flattens and distorts the shape of each petal; secondly, the complex colour harmonies of, say, Monet’s water lilies are dispensed with in favour of planar zones of flat colour. Indeed, throughout the series and with the present work as a case in point, Warhol tended to choose synthetic, unnatural colours whose artificial hues belied their manufactured plasticity. As was his usual practice, when Warhol converted the original colour photograph into a two tone screen he radically heightened the contrast of the original image so that in the registration of the image on canvas the minutiae details are lost and the forms become increasingly abstract. As a result, the Flower painꦉtings are the most abstract ꧒works that Warhol produced in the 1960s.

After the Death and Disaster series of 1962-1963 – which depicted sensational images of electric chairs, suicides and horrendous car crashes – the motif of four blossoming hibiscus flowers appears almost anodyne, a palliative to the horror and violence of previous imagery. Despite its apparent decorative quality, however, which doubtless appealed to Warhol in his program to make a truly popular art form, the motif is laced with the tragedy and morbidity that permeates Warhol’s entire oeuvre. Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, the m🧸otif of the flourishing hibiscus serves as a metaphor for the brevity and unsustainability of celebrity – the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer’s gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as a synecdoche for the frailty and fragility of life, a haunting contemplatio🍌n of death that is never far removed from Warhol’s work.