New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Andy Warhol: Dollar Signs, 1982
Nice, Palais Massena, Andy Warhol, 1982
Beverly Hills, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: $, 1997, illustrated in colour on the cover
New York, Van de Weghe Fine Art, Andy Warhol Dollar Signs, 2004, pp. 46-47, no. 10, illustrated in colour

"I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about. I've been working on soup and I've been doing some paintings of money. I just do it because I like it." (The artist cited in David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 90)

Executed in 1981, Andy Warhol's Dollar Sign is one of the most instantly legible and recognisable Warholian motifs that reflects the complete synthesis of art and money within his oeuvre, as well as its creator's own apotheosis from artist to international superstar. First exhibited with Leo Castelli at his Greene Street gallery in 1982, the monumental Dollar Signs afford insight into his enduring fascination with commodity culture. Pulsating through richly saturated layers of pure colour, off-set multiple impressions of the '$' motif appear to throb against the saturated blood-orange background. Filling the entire height of the vast canvas, this larger-than-life symbol of bulging wealth is rendered with the immaculꦫate clarity of Warhol's perfected silkscreen technique. Regarded as among the artist's most iconic and emblematic mature works, here Warhol presents the definitive symbol of modern society with unprecedented grandeur and painterly confidence.

Throughout his career, the dollar bill had provided Warhol with a point of reference upon which to base his examination of contemporary American consumer culture. As Warhol explained: "Buying is much more American than thinking... Americans are not so interested in selling. What they really like to do is buy." (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to Z and Back Again, New York, 1975, p. 229).

Like his portraits of Marilyn and Elvis, Warhol's dollar paintings are all about desire. Within a society immersed in the pursuit of wealth, by the dawn of the 1980s Warhol's art itself had become a major status symbol that conferred kudos on the collector. As Warhol explained, "I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall." (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to Z and Back Again, New York, 1975, p. 134) It both intrigued and amused Warhol that his art possessed similar powers as money; capable of stimulating desire and imagination simulta💯neously. The works based upon this subject were a radically direct exposé of the false separation that had hitherto been drawn between the art market and the production of art. Within the American bourgeoisie, owning 'great' art had frequently been an exercise in pious exclusivity. However, rather than subscribing to this, Warhol's paintings of money sought to lay bare and expose these relationships that had hitherto been discreetly taken for granted.

The subjectﷺ of money in his oeuvre provides a recurring leitmotif with which to chart the changing times of his life. Rolled up dollar bills stuffed into soup cans had provided the subject for some of Warhol's earliest and most iconic drawings and paintings before eventually becoming the subject for his groundbreaking, first silk-screened series of early 1962. Lyrically understated in their frontal, deliberately flattened aesthetic, these first silk-screens rendered with a quasi-forger's precision, belie Warhol's desire as an emerging young artist to literally print money. Depicting dollar bills either individually or multiplied across canvases, these seminal works sardonically laid bare the luxury of owning art.

Executed nearly two decades after the first of Warhol's money paintings, the monumental single Dollar Signs of 1981 provide the ultimate expression of his lifelong fascination with consumerism. Like Warhol's first Pop paintings which examined the relationship between big business and the common man through enlarged icons of consumerism like Coca Col♎a and Campbell's soup, Warhol here similarly takes the currency of this relationship and brusquely presents it with all brazen euphoria synonymous with that decade. No longer taking the entire bill as their subject but instead focusing in upon the unabashed icon of money - the monumental, isolated '$' - Warhol hones in on arguably the biggest brand of all. One of the most recognised logos anywhere in the world, simultaneously a symbol of the American Dream and international denominator of wealth. Having removed any specific denominations, the currency symbol takes on a more generalised, totemic status, particularly in this scale which towers above the beholder. Unlike his previous drawings from money, the motif is ꦓnot appropriated from a specific source. Instead the two superimposed screens derive from his own drawings. The slanted dollar sign, used in the present work, is the fullest of all his designs. There is something bold and powerful about its forceful presence in the royal blue, block-filled font of the underlying symbol, which is set of by the green hues which electrify the composition. By the 1980s, the silkscreen process which Warhol had coined in the early 1960s has been refined to such a degree that is capable of registering with great nuance and precision the delicacy of Warhol's shading technique. In the green paint film, although it is mechanically produced, we can sense the strength of Warhol's draftsmanship in the delicacy of his shading technique which seemingly dematerialises the flatness of the silkscreen.

This, Warhol's last series of money paintings, metaphorically reveals that by 1981, Pop art was a historical triumph and an entrenched cultural phenomenon. They mirror his larger-than-life, personal exuberance an꧅d surpꦇass mere pictorial depiction to become a form of cultural currency in themselves. With its brash palette, this is one of Warhol's most ostentatious and flagrantly capitalistic explorations into the theme. Tantalising and full of promise, it is like a shrine to wealth. Gleaming with the sparkling promise of a new era of prosperity, it dramatically prefigures the atmosphere of exuberance and extravagance that characterised the art world of the ensuing decade.