This work is registered in The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc., New York, under number PA 25.045

''Politics cannot be banished entirely from this image, of course,... but in these new paintings he has taken something from sculpture (Calder’s stabiles, Claes Oldenburg’s giant variations of household objects), something from architecture (from the towers of San Gimigniano to the World Trade Center) and somethingꦑ of painting (spreading the colour as a schoolboy spreads jam on his first day at summer camp) and come up with an end result that comb♋ines imagination with punch.''

John Russell, 'Art: Warhol's Hammer and Sickles' in The New York Times, 21 January 1977

Executed in late 1976, the present work is from a cycle of paintings that Andy Warhol exhibited under the equivocal title Still Lifes at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1977. Depicting a hammer and sickle, motifs loaded with semantic and political symbolism, Warhol's nonpartisan exhibition title disingenuously dissembles the poignant political import of the work while concomitantly locating it within the broader art-historical and critical framework of the s♕till life genre.

Despite disavowing any political ties to his work, Warhol – the archetypal Pop provocateur – could not paint a series of images of the hammer and sickle in the cultural environment of the Cold War without inviting politicised glosses from his critics. By the late 1970s, the relationship between the Superpowers – America and the Soviet Union – was at its most strained, characterised not by military combat but by a climate of tension and mutual perceptions of hostility between East and West, communism and capitalism. The hammer and sickle were unilaterally recognised as the symbol of international communism, adopted as the official emblem of the Red Army in the 1920s and later set in yellow upon the Red Flag of the Soviet Union. Symbols of the industrial proletariat and the peasantry, the hammer and the sickle together symbolised the unity between industrial and agricultural wor🃏kers under the aegis of the State, the core principal of communist ideology.

Warhol conceived of the idea of painting the hammer and sickle series while on a trip to Italy for the opening of his Ladies and Gentlemen exhibition at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in 1975. At the time, the symbol of the hammer superimposed on the sickle was the most conspicuous graffito in the streets of Milan and Rome. In Italy, a democratic country since the end of the Second World War, the instantly legible symbol enshrined an antiestablishment fervour and anti-capitalist ideology, a repost to the increasingly ubiquitous insignia of American consumerism and brands such as Coca-Cola which were spreading through Europe like wildfire. Just as he had done in the 1960s with that most quintessential capitalist emblem, the Coca-Cola bottle, here Warhol decided to adopt the logo of communism as a subj✨ect for👍 his art, transforming it into a Warholian emblem par excellence.

On his return to the Factory, Warhol charged his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone to track down a suitable source image from Soviet paraphernalia. As the latter recounts, he searched through New York's Red bookshops but could not find anything appropriate, ''They were too flat or too graphic. The answer was to go down to Canal Street, into a hardware store, and buy a real hammer and sickle. Then I could shoot them, lit with long, menacing shadows, and add the drama that was missing from the flat-stencilled book versions… It always amused me that Andy, the ultimate Capitalist, and me, the ultimate Libertarian, could be suspected of Communist activity.'' (Ronnie Cutrone cited in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, C&M Arts, Hammer and Sickle, 2002).

It is this brilliant irony of Warhol, the arch-Capitalist, engaging with Communist iconography, which lends the present work its potency. To heighten this tension, Warhol intentionally leaves visible the logo of the American manufacturer embossed on the handle of the sickle. Our eye, attracted by the swathe of lilac paint, reads the insignia 'Champion no. 15 by True Temper', which paradoxically brands the♕ tools as part of a free market economy and radically destabilises their intended connotations. Unsurprisingly, in Warhol's hands these symbols of Socialism are demoted to consumerist objects, like Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes and Campbell's Soup cans. Furthermore, the arrangement of the objects separated on the tabletop, specific to this particular version of the series, further subverts the intended meaning of the symbolism. Instead of being crossed in a show of unity and strength, the hammer and the sickle are here disengaged, inferring division and schism. In their present guise, the objects appear more as instruments of violence, like the Guns and Knives of his later series, accentuated by their looming shadows. As always with Warhol, the all-pervasive theme of death is never far from his work. Unlike other works in the series which stick to a palette of (socialist) red, white and black more commonly associated with the political posters of the Soviet era, the unorthodox vibrancy of palette in this particularly rare example further dismantles the intended political charge, replacing it with the consumerist appeal of Warholian vision. It is this tension that makes the present work such a powerful image, deconstructing symbolism through colour and composition in order to mock and diminish the ideas behind communism. In the present work, the binary of Capitalism and Communism is shown to be a false opposition: both succumb to Warhol's levelling hand.

Yet, as the neutral title for the original Castelli exhibition suggests, running parallel to any ostensible political interpretation is Warhol's challenge to the dynamics of art history's most conventional and traditional genre: the still life. The hammer and sickle, once separated, lose their political connotations and the viewer is asked toꦛ accept them as objects per se. In the series, Warhol worked from twelve different source photographs, each with a different constellation of the objects on the white draped surface. This rigorous concern with the arrangement of the objects combined with the painterly rendering of the composition, most manifest in the present example, recalls the works of Zurbaran and Chardin, while the simplicity of the forms and the use of shadows to reinforce the relationships between objects are reminiscent of Cézanne.  The Still Life genre has always reflected the age in which it was painted; here Warhol's 'still life' reflects an age where religious, moral and political values have grown subordinate to superficial commercial imperatives - an era of American promotional advertising.

One of the largest format works from the series, the present work take𝓀s the still life - traditionally painted on an intimate, domestic size - and presents it on billboard scale. A landmark work in Warhol's maౠture oeuvre, its sardonic comment on the Capitalist/Communist dichotomy shows Warhol to be the ever pertinent historical commentator of his day.