Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Cars
picture sequence 1986 / 1987
Screen print, acrylic on canvas
Image: Title page of the catalogue Business Art, Cantz Verlag Stuttgart, 2002
Andy Warhol, the key figure in the Pop Art movement, is a prominent presence in the collection with his 1986/87 series 'Cars'. This was his last picture sequence, commissioned by the group on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the motor car. It remained incomplete. 80 pictures were planned, intended to tell the story of the motor car using 20 selected Mercedes models, from the Daimler motor-coach and the Benz patent motor car dating from 1886, down to the present day. In fact 35 pictures and 12 large-format drawings showing eight different models were finished.
These rare vintage cars and exclusive models may seem to fall outside Warhol's specific "iconography of the everyday", but in fact they don't. They are luxury products that are universally aspired to but scarcely available to the masses, fetishized objects of general desire, and as such they have typical characteristics that can also be found in other thematic areas covered by Warhol. Warhol used his tried-and-tested, internally refracted strategy to convey his complex statement in a convincing way.
He reproduced photographic archive and advertising material in a mechanical screen print process, thus largely negating the artist's personal involvement in composition and picture manufacture, and severely disrupting the aura of the work of art. Both the character of the images used and the manufacturing process identify the flood of reproduced images as the trigger for clichéd ideas and the behaviour derived from them.
Background
Warhol went down in art history as a painter of the here and now, as someone whose provocative creative tactics were based on the "impudent affirmation" (H.D. Buchloh, 1989) of long-established social behaviour and communication patterns - especially in the sphere of compulsive and clichéd consumer practices. The simultaneous devaluation and trivialization of objects that is an inevitable concomitant of their mass reproduction find their equivalent in individual models repeated stereotypically in the multiple portrayals. Conversely there is a remarkably sensual and seductive quality in the way the cars are presented without shadows, as if they were floating, and in the iridescent colours. By using advertising's powerful devices apparently unrefracted, but stripping the objects presented their former advertising function, he paradoxically creates a new aesthetic himself, by unmasking these practices.
Biographical details
1928 Born in Pittsburgh, died 1987 in New York.
1945-59 Studies (pictorial design) at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh.
Works as a shop-window dresser while at college.
1949 Moves to New York and works as a commercial artist.
1956 World tour.
Free-lance artist from 1960.
1963 Makes his first film, 'Sleep'.
1968 Attempt to kill Warhol.
1969 Magazine 'Interview' published.External link: More about Andy Warhol
