Attilio Codognato, Venice
Dino Zevi, London
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired directly fr🉐om the above by the present owner

The fragility of life was a driving obsession of Warhol’s from the outset and inspired some of his most powerful and celebrated works of the early 1960s such as the Electric Chairs, Car Crashes and Race Riots. The series of Skulls he made more than a decade later marked the mature evolution of this fascination becoming momento mori for t⛦h♛e Pop generation as well as emblems for his recurring allusions to death.

Eternally fixated with the shallow transience of fame and celebrity, Warhol lived with the belief that “Death can really make you look like a star.” (cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Bilbao, Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, A Factory, 2000, n/p) This mindset was seen in his posthumous portraits of Marilyn, Elvis and Liz from the early 60s; icons in themselves that quickly attained as well as enhanced the near-mythical status of their ever youthful subjects. By the 1970s he was as famous as these Hollywood stars and such was his success and reputation as the barometer of cultural cool that he became increasingly pre-occupied with portrait commissions for his new rich and famous friends in New York’s high society. Actors, politicians, musicians and celebrities all willingly submitted themselves unto the beautification of his working process as he set about transferring their features from washed-out Polaroid snapshots into large iridescent canvases. It could have been the lack of objective distance and irony within this new chapter in his career that prompted him to seek new outlets and themes with which to explore life’s more pertinent and pressing issues. This he found in his Communist themed works like Mao and the Hammer and Sickle as well as in the Skulls. The Skulls in particular provide a sober counterbalance to the wealthy façades of airbrushed glamour seen in his comဣmissio⛄ned celebrity portraits. Although sharing the same brightly coloured, day-glo palettes, their colourist optimism and vitality only serves to underline the transience of life pitted against the omnipotence of death.

Since the 16^th century when Jesuits began advocating the contemplation of death as a spiritual exercise, skulls have been a regular motif within the Vanitas tradition of Western Art. Consequently much has been said regarding the art historical context of Warhol’s Skulls, not least about their lurid and decidedly casual appropriation as a means of further blurring the boundaries between high and low culture. Here the skull is cast against an empty yellow background. It is a setting of isolation that performs a similar role to that of the blank canvas in his earliest paintings on the subject of death and disaster. It is also interesting to note that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had recently purchased the earliest known Vanitas Still Life in existence, a 1603 Dutch painting by Jacques de Gheyn the elder, and although it is uncertain whether this painting influenced him in his choice of this series, any art image so conspicuously combining death and money would have doubtless interested him. The Skull series marks a breakthrough in Warhol’s work revealing for the first time not only his personal association with death but also a private readiness for it. They importantly prompted the series of self-portraits he made in 1978, the year of his fiftieth birthday, in which a skull rests on either his head or his shoulder, as well as the late skull-like ‘Fright Wig’ self-portraits he made in the months immedia🌼tely preceding his death.