Judith Goldberg Fine Art, New York
Christie's New York, November 10, 1988, Lot 174
Private Collection
Christie's New York, May 14, 2002, Lot 1
Acquired by the present owner from the above

 

This work is in very good condition overall. In the upper corners there is evidence of slight handling and faint brown discolorations mostly to the right of center on the top edge. There is a faint liquid spot located 1 5/8 - 1 7/8 in. from the right edge and 3 - 3 1/4 in. from the top edge. In the far right column of bills, there is a faint wedge-shaped linear impression running diagonally from the top edge to the bottom - lines begin with a 3/8 in. gap through the top 3 bills and narrow into a single line in the bottom 2 bills. The sheet of paper is hinged at intervals to a silk mat, and framed in a beveled edge wood frame with gilded face and dark brown sides under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

From the earliest dollar images such as Fifteen One Dollar Bills to his later monumental dollar signs, the subject of money in Warhol's oeuvre provides a recurring leitmotif for his examination of contemporary American consumerism. Like his celebrity portraits, Warhol's dollar paintings and drawings are about desire, and it amused Warhol that his art possessed powers similar to money, stimulating desire and imagination simultaneously. Various apocryphal stories exist on the birth of this image, most associated with Andy's query about what he should paint. But the established fact is that his first silkscreens were ordered based on his original drawings of the front and backs of single $1 and $2 dollar bills. Warhol soon progressed to silkscreens that were🌳 based on photographic images, rather than drawings, but his paintings from March-April 1962 of flattened dollar bills, both front and back, are his earliest silkscreen paintings, so this composition and subject matter mark an💞 historical moment in Warhol's innovation of this great Pop art technique.

Rolled up and scattered dollar bills were the subject for some of Warhol's earliest and most iconic drawings by hand, but Fifteen One Dollar Bills is one of a small group of works on paper created with the use of a wooden block, mounted with a metal relief dollar design of roughly the same size as the original drawings for the screens. Just as with the gum eraser stamp used in his Airmail Stamps and S&H Green Stamps, Warhol used this woodblock for the grid compositions of repeated imagery, similar to the painting Eighteen Dollar Bills.  In that painting and Fifteen One Dollar Bills, the frontality of the deliberately flattened aesthetic, sugges💦tive of a sheet of freshly printed money, is best suited to Warhol's serial Pop idiom.