Picture "Man Ray" (1974)
Picture "Man Ray" (1974)
Quick info
limited, 100 copies | signed | numbered | dated | colour serigraph on paper | framed | size 88 x 88 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Man Ray" (1974)
Paris, November 1973 - The Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino introduced perhaps the most famous living artist at the time, Andy Warhol, to a legend of Surrealist photography, his compatriot Man Ray. Since returning from wartime exile in the United States in 1951, Man Ray had been living again in the city where he had moved in Dadaist circles in the 1920s and 1930s, creating a body of work that would profoundly influence Warhol.
Warhol spent an entire day in Man Ray’s studio apartment in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. The two artists photographed each other, and Warhol also made several sketches. In his memoirs, Warhol recounts that he managed to take only ten photos before Man Ray put a cigar in his mouth, making the then eighty-three-year-old appear particularly frail. Warhol’s portrait of his artistic idol captivates with the gestural brushwork he applied to the photographic image. The dynamic application of paint is echoed in the silkscreen, lending the work an unusual yet compelling painterly quality.
Original screenprint, 1974. Edition: 100 copies on Strathmore Bristol paper, signed, numbered and dated on the back. Motif size/sheet size 80 x 80 cm. Size in frame 88 x 88 cm as shown.
Producer: ars mundi Edition Max Büchner GmbH, Bödekerstraße 13, 30161 Hanover, Germany, [email protected]
About Andy Warhol
1928-1987
Andy Warhol was America's most famous artist. He was considered a revolutionary, eccentric and inventor of Pop Art, all at once. Art critics praise him with titles that have never been bestowed on any artist before - not even Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali. Alfred Nemeczek comments: "They (the praises) ranged from "pop star" to "pop artist", elevated the "pop genius" to "pop prince" to "prince of pop" and further up to "pop king", "pop tsar" and "grand mogul". But the "Picasso of Pop-art" has also been baptised as "High Priest" and "Pope of Pop"." (Artists - Critical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art)
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and died in New York in 1987. After high school, the son of Czech immigrants went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh as a working student. In 1949, he settled in New York and three years later he made his debut with his work at the Hugo Gallery. Until that time, he was working as a commercial artist for fashion magazines, designing Christmas cards, LP covers and weather maps for television. Shortly afterwards, however, the artist had the idea of placing everyday objects at the centre of his pictorial motifs. Using the medium of graphic art, he created coveted cult objects.
Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings of the red and white Campbell soup cans and the two-dollar bill. With these works, Warhol radically broke with art tradition in the USA and England from the 1950s onwards and is considered one of the leading figures in the new art movement, called Pop Art.
Alongside Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselman are American representatives who looked for their pictorial themes in the world of advertising, comics and Hollywood superstars. Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe became icons in Warhol's pictorial repertoire.
Transforming everyday objects into works of art allows them to receive a certain level of attention that they never receive as things that are used over and over again. Warhol's way of photographically reproducing the object demanded that the object itself and nothing else must achieve an effect. The works in which he implemented repetitions of the same motif also require this, but they have an additional effect through the colourful rearrangements.
The artist sees the world as it is and represents it: "I am extraordinarily passive. I take things as they are. I just watch, I observe the world."
The field of graphic arts, that includes artistic representations, which are reproduced by various printing techniques.
Printmaking techniques include woodcuts, copperplate engraving, etching, lithography, serigraphy, among others.
In the early 1950s, a movement took over the cultural scene. Young artists from the U.S. and the UK independently broke with all traditions of artistic creativity, giving rise to a new art movement in modern art.
In the U.S., Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and James Rosenquist who were seeking their themes in the world of advertising and comics, in star cult and anonymous urban culture. With bright colours, over dimensioning and manipulating depth perspective, they created new provocative works. Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi became pioneers of Pop Art in England through the famous "This is Tomorrow" at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. In the 1960s, they were followed by David Hockney, Allan Jones, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier.