Andy Warhol's 5 Deaths, executed between August and September 1963, embodies the advanced culmination of themes explored throughout his Death and Disaster series of 1962 to 1965. It is endemic to the Car Crash works of late 1962 to early 1964, which collectively stand amidst the most formidably stimulating and provoking artworks by any artist in the post-war years.  Significantly, the present work is one of the first examples of Warhol's use of Alizarin Crimson, a colour he greatly favoured in the 1970s.  The poignancy of this unusu🌱al hue seeping through the black screen lends a mystery and unique edge to the composition, the powerful dark tones colluding on the surface of his ca♑nvas creating a deep luxury while concomitantly implying a dark intrigue.

The present work belongs to the second run of paintings from the 5 Deaths screen, comprising seven single-unit works. Warhol had completed the first set of paintings earlier in 1963, and these comprise multiple repetitions on the same canvas. However, after his experimentation with multiple canvases in the groundbreaking Ethel Scull commission, in the second run he broke the equation between image multiplication and canvas size by creating individual works which could be reconfigured and variously hinged together, either side by side or top to bottom. With reference to 5 Deaths, Gerard Malanga recalls that in 'initiating Andy's serial imagery on separate identically shaped canvases' they were 'anticipating the Flower paintings to come' (Gerard Malanga, 'Photograph of a Painted Photograph: 5 Deaths', in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Stellan Holm Gallery, Andy Warhol: 5 Deaths, 2002, p.12). Frei and Printz further describe how the second run of 5 Deaths paintings serves as 'a bridge between the work of the early 1960s and Warhol's Factory production beginning in 1964' (Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963: The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, New York 2002, p. 437). In 5 Deaths, therefore, repeated mimesis is no longer constrained by thওe dimensions of a single canvas, but initiated to engage more ambitiously with the effects of duplication.

5 Deaths exclaims an immediately harrowing and intensely violent scenario: the instant aftermath of a brutal car crash.  In an interview with Gene Swenson, published in Art News in November 1963, Warhol stated that 'when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect'.  Salient to the Death and Disaster works is the notion of replication. In his 1970 monograph, Rainer Crone discusses how, although the car crash photos 'evoke the immediacy of the actual event...this decreases as such occurrences become more frequent' (Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, p. 29). The raw power of this confrontational image remains urgently accosting, despite our immersion in supposedly desensitizing mass-media representations of violence and brutality. The tonal polarization of the silk-screen impression bleakly particularizes the bewildered faces and dramatizes the empty stares of lifeless concussion. The atrocity here is highly quotidian: it is a thoroughly everyday catastrophe; typical of what Walter Hopps calls the 'unpredictable choreography of death' amongst the 'banality of everyday disasters' (Walter Hopps cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988, p. 9).  Warhol, himself obsessively fixated with the fragility of existence, here scrutinizes the public face of a private disaster and questions why anonymous victims are elevated to celebrity through their flirtation with death. Posited at the centre of the Death and Disaster canon, 5 Deaths is Warhol's inquisition into two monumental themes of his career: the relationship betwe✤en permanence 🔥and transience, and the cause and effect of celebrity.

Within the painting, the corporeal indications of five bodies are discernible: the man and woman emerging from the car's windows at the right of the image; the woman staring starkly out through the car's rear windscreen; the rear view of a body's trunk behind her; and the ominous hand drooping behind the car's rear wing at the left of the image. The undercarriage and main chassis of the stylized two-tonne automobile are cleanly silhouetted against the night sky. That this metallic expanse seemingly remains largely unscathed emphasizes the vehicle's massive form and accentuates the crushing effect of its weight on its mangled window frames and occupants. Intertwined with the deformed metal superstructure, jointly sprawled across the asphalt concrete, are the twisted human bodies: man and machine fused through mundane catastrophe. Thus one of the great symbols of 1950s and 1960s America, a facilitator of individualism and a key signifier of social mobility, the automobile, becomes the devastating spectre of indiscriminate fatality. As Neil Printz relates, 'the car crash turns the American dream into a nightmare' (Neil Printz cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Houston, Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988, p.16). 

5 Deaths offers the nightmare, but also concurrently normalizes this dystopian vision of sanitized suburban brutality. As ever with Warhol's oeuvre, import is incited not only by subject, but also by method, process and context. Silk-screened on alizarin crimson, the notionally horrific and terrifying subject matter is revealed through the patterned gradations of anonymous silk-screen dots. The nature of this rendering is strategically impersonal. Hopps succinctly describes that 'Warhol took for granted the notion that the obvious deployment of traditional rendering need not be revealed or employed, thereby expunging manual bravura from his work' (Ibid., p. 7). In 5 Deaths the mechanical silk-screen dot and absence of 'manual bravura' desensitize the subject, at once evoking the mass production of newsprint photojournalism and the unceasing everyday phenomenon that the car crash had itself become. In addition, Warhol faithfully reproduces the composition of the photojournalist, replicating the foreign aesthetic of a found image. The source for 5 Deaths was an 8 by 10 inch glossy black-and-white photograph distributed by United Press International, and discovered by Warhol's assistant Gerard Malanga amongst piles of news agency photos in a bookstore on 7^th Avenue and 23^rd Street. Despite the horror of the scene before h🍨im, the photojournalist has cropped the image through the 𓆉view finder to engender narrative and provide an aesthetically satisfying picture according to compositional convention.

Also demanding interpretation in 5 Deaths is the role of celebrity. It is important to remember that contemporaneous with the Death and Disaster works are Warhol's iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy: three superstars touched by death and disaster. Fame through death captivated Warhol, who himself wrote 'I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish and everything could just keep going the way it was, only you just wouldn't be there' (cited in Neil Printz, 'Painting Death in America', in Exhibition Catalogue, Houston, The Menil Collection,  Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988,  p.17). The potential for a private tragedy to catapult anonymity into the glare of the public arena and the uncertain interplay between anonymous suffering and broadcast exposure of personal bereavement are pervading themes permanently locked into 5 Deaths.