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ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) SILVER LIZ, 1963 signed twice and postdated "Andy Warhol Andy Warhol 1965...

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ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) SILVER LIZ, 1963 signed twice and postdated Andy Warhol Andy Warhol 1965...
ANDY WARHOL
(1928-1987)
SILVER LIZ, 1963
signed twice and postdated
"Andy Warhol Andy Warhol 1965" on the overlap (canvas with image)
silkscreen ink, acrylic and
spray paint on linen in two parts
40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm) each
40 x 80 in. (101.6 x 203.2 cm) overall
right panel executed in 1963
left panel executed in 1965 <p>PROVENANCE
Ferus Gallery, LOS ANGELES
Donald and Lynn Factor, BEVERLY HILLS
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, NEW YORK, Nov. 18, 1970, lot 32
Shaindy Fenton, FORT WORTH
Patti Gilford
Private collection, CHICAGO <p>EXHIBITED
LOS ANGELES, Ferus Gallery, 1963 (canvas with image)
Otis Art Gallery of Los Angeles County, HOLLYWOOD COLLECTS,
April 5-May 15, 1970, by error cat. no. 434 (illustrated)
Seattle Art Museum and Denver Art Museum, ANDY WARHOL
PORTRAITS, November 1976-March 1977 <p>LITERATURE
R. Crone, ANDY WARHOL, NEW YORK, 1970, no. 91
R. Crone, ANDY WARHOL, NEW YORK, 1976, no. 100
G. Frei and N. Printz, eds., ANDY WARHOL CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ: PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES 1961-1963, LONDON, 2001,
pp. 395 & 401, no. 441 (illustrated)
"I think everybody should be a machine. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me." This utterance, declared by Andy Warhol in 1963, the same year that he painted the right-hand panel of SILVER LIZ, 1963 signifies his desire to project a contradictory and ambivalent persona. He challenged the notion of individual expression so prized by the dominant Abstract Expressionists, and, in its stead, he exalted the idea of self-as-automaton. Considered alongside his own obsession with fame and adoration, his negation of individuality, subjectivity, and self-importance is complicated if not contradicted. Moreover, Warhol's statement suggests the dismissal of agency and moral responsibility in a postwar commodity culture. Perhaps he was commenting on the impossibility of fulfilling the role of the genius artist recording his personal vision for posterity in a world where subjectivity is made obsolete by the insatiable appetite of the commodification process. Both his work and self-made image ingeniously underscore the pursuant complacency that increasingly encumbered his own era.
The early 1960s marked his launch into artworld stardom. In 1963, he appropriately christened his new studio space "The Factory" and also had his second watershed exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the avant-garde haven where Irving Blum first showed Warhol's silkscreen panels of consumer products and celebrities in 1962. Using an inherently technological and impersonal medium, Warhol created large-scale photo-silkscreens that exude the same contradictions and ambivalence revealed in the statement above. That images of Campbell's Soup cans were juxtaposed with images of celebrities or that such venerated personalities as Elizabeth Taylor were exhibited in assembly-line fashion is indicative of a certain collapse between person and thing, between body and disembodied
For the 1963 Ferus exhibition, Warhol made about ten silver Liz panels, each measuring 40 x 40 inches. The near identical canvases of the Ferus series recall parts that make up a machine - objectified, fragmented, equivalent, replaceable. Both the 1962 and 1963 Ferus installations must have appeared as panoramas of mechanical parts: interchangeable, fleeting, but interestingly not productive. While the various parts that comprise a machine work together to produce something material, there is no tangible end product with the Warholian machine. The series assembled together in the gallery suggests a cadence of movement similar to the endless motion of production in an exacerbated commodity culture. The glossy veneer of surface, movement, and abundance imply the eventual satisfying of desire, which in this case never occurs and amounts to nothing but the presence of a continual and circuitous insatiability. Through both content and form, Warhol literalizes his industrial maxim and takes Pop Art's fascination with mass culture to a much more complex and nuanced level.
Considering the image of Liz pictured here, Warhol had begun collecting photographs of celebrities at the age of six. When he began to include them in his artwork decades later, he would turn to figures who were unlike the fleeting celebrities of today, but had attained a lasting iconic status. Marilyn, Elvis, and Liz are among his best examples and, interestingly, all share a tumultuous personal life, a dark side. With Liz, he took the most iconic photograph of her from his collection, cropped it so as to avoid a background, and incorporated it into his silkscreen canvas. Confronting the viewer is a larger-than-life but vacuous visage wherein a beautiful Hollywood idol is seemingly celebrated anew, now in the context of high art rather than that of mass media. Upon closer examination, however, a certain ambivalence surfaces with the somewhat odd and disturbing formal effects of flatness, disconsonant coloring, and large scale. A playful but somewhat morbid
x-ray-like residue results from double photographic impressions made against the silver ground. The garish red lipstick and bright blue smears of eye shadow hint at a sense of hysteria as they fall blatantly out of place on her slightly electric pink face. What remains is an odd sense of overbearing presence coupled with an inherent absence, an effect heightened two years later by the addition of the monochromatic silver screen, or "blank," to the initial solo Ferus-type canvas. Many of the original Ferus-type Liz paintings, under the influence of Warhol's later ties to the New York dealer Leo Castelli, have been coupled with "blanks" and sometimes separated again. With this SILVER LIZ, Warhol was surprisingly able to match the silver spray-painted background of the original canvas, creating a cohesive diptych. It is believed that while in the collection of Shaindy Fenton in the early to mid-seventies, a second signature was added to the work, as it is signed and postdated "Andy Warhol Andy Warhol 1965."
Finally, the allusion to a new religion of consumerism in terms of the use of iconic imagery, the diptych format, the high-art context, and the fervent adoration of Hollywood personalities in an increasingly secular society, serves to heighten the interesting tension and confusion between life and death, subjectivity and objectivity, body and disembodied, presence and absence. The complication of such humanistic distinctions is an underlying subtext to much of Warhol's work and is especially evident in the Liz diptych in its current, more distinct form and in considering its previous incarnations as single canvas, interchangeable unit, and multiple. SILVER LIZ slips in and out of circulation, changing face as she goes, much like a currency. Just as Warhol revealed her as impenetrable and ever slippery, so he enabled the construction of his own public image. We now come full circle to Warhol's declaration that we all be machines with the celebration of an individual whose public image is produced by the external forces of consumer culture itself, and whose private life suffers from the blight of objectification and subsequent fetishization
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