Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York
Private Collection, Connecticut

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background tends more to true white and the blacks are a richer, deeper hue. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are faint handing marks along the centre right of the bottom edge towards the lower left corner and further small marks 20cm below the centre of the left edge. There is a very faint 10cm line of smudging to the centre of the lower left quadrant presumably inherent to the artist's working process. There is very faint wear to the lower corners of the composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in the penultimate year of his prolific life, Missile Map is a supreme example of Warhol's phenomenal capacity to crystallise biting social commentary through icon♓ic, familiar imagery. A map of Asia, with the border between the former Soviet Union and China at its centre, is duplicated in two tonally polarised variations. Scattered throughout the north east of the former USSR, diagrammatic symbols indicate the locations of missile silos, which are supplemented by labelling acronyms. Chartin💙g the convergence of two titanic superpowers and encapsulating the paranoia of the Cold War in iconic format, in both its appearance and thematic content this work is seminal to Warhol's late period.

The schematised map is immediately evocative of the Cold War stereotype that charted the positioning of military facilities and targets endemic to the processes of surveillance and scrutiny that characterised the forty-year ideological conflict. Enlisting his world-renowned silkscreen technique, Missile Map engages the agency of mass media and celebrity to describe a fundamentally threatening and ominous image. In Warhol's source image, the terrifying and constant threat of nuclear annihilation is reduced to the objectivity of a banal diagrammatic. By replicating this image Warhol simultaneously compounds and dissipates the emoꦜtional threat in this topography of fear. He has accentuated danger via a proliferation of missiles but undermined the original diagram's sincerity through the mundanity of repeti﷽tion.

This work belongs to Warhol's Positive-Negative series and as Germano Celant has suggested, by inverting the tonality of the images in this series, Warhol referenced his own iconic practice of appropriating found images from advertising, mass media and p𒈔opular culture. Reversing the appearance and meaning of his found sources, Warhol added another layer of image transformation to his well-established working method. Furthermore, as the present work shows both the positive and negative versions it explicates the mechanic💫s of his "reversal" process.

The ominous nature of this work's subject matter fits into the strong theme of death that runs through Warhol's entire oeuvre, from the legendary "Death and Disasters" series of the early 1960s, to his obsessive infatuation with melancholic self-portraiture in the final years of his life. Indeed, viewed alongside the celebrated "fright wig" portraits and even his "Last Supper" series, this portentous map can be easily fitted into Warhol's renowned fascination with mortality. By implying these innermost preoccupations of Warhol's psychology, as well as bꦕeing an adroit and subversive commentary on Cold War paranoia and the emergence of new super-powers at the dawn of Gorbachev's glasnost, this work is brilliantly conceived and truly exceptional amidst Warhol's final output.