Prints and Multiples

Literature:

Feldman & Schellmann IIB.375

Lot Essay:

Action Picture, the unique screenprint and trial proof presented here, offers rare insight into Andy Warhol’s work from 1984 to 1986, shortly before his untimely death in 1987. The work reflects not only the greater shift in Warhol’s oeuvre from references drawn from mass culture to art historical sources, but also tells the fascinating story of Warhol’s collaboration with his publishers and his printer in the creation of his well-known Cowboys and Indians series.

1984 was an important year for the evolution of subject matter in Warhol’s artistic canon. It was this year that he began to diverge from appropriating images from popular culture (celebrity portraits, advertisements, his own polaroids, for example) and venture into using paintings from museum collections, or ‘high art’. In his print series Details of Renaissance Paintings (1984), for instance, he utilized paintings by Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Paolo Uccello as his source material. In that year he also produced four unique screenprints based on paintings by Edvard Munch. It was also between 1984 and 1986 that Warhol created his magnificent series of paintings, The Last Supper, based on Leonardo’s iconic mural.

In Action Picture, Warhol appropriated the center section of Charles Schreyvogel’s seminal painting Breaking Through the Line (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma), <https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/011235>, from the early 1900s, of a cavalry officer brazenly charging towards the viewer amid an altercation between Native Americans and American soldiers. This engagement with both high art and themes distinctly tied with the history of the American West proves to be unique in all of Warhol’s artistic oeuvre. However, interestingly, as the work was omitted from the final portfolio, it exists, much like the painting from which it was based, only in unique form. 36 trial proofs of this image were created, each experimenting with different colors and compositions that are wholly individual.

In 1984, when Warhol embarked upon the project of creating Cowboys and Indians with the publishers Edmund Gaultney and Kent Klineman, he did not realize that the project would require two years of work involving battles over the content with the publishers and continual delays. Contract negotiations for the series were ongoing into 1985 and, when the dust settled, one of the unique provisions of the contract was that Gaultney and Klineman had final approval of all images in the suite. This seemingly small provision led to an unusually drawn-out production process whereby Warhol and his printer, Rupert Jasen Smith, created images of multiple subjects and an array of trial proofs where they would experiment with color and composition until they landed on an image that Gaultney and Klineman approved.

In the end, there were 10 images published in the regular portfolio (John Wayne, Annie Oakley, General Custer, Northwest Coast Mask, Kachina Dolls, Plains Indian Shield, Mother and Child, Geronimo, Indian Head Nickel, and Teddy Roosevelt). These final images hearken back to Warhol’s days as a portrait artist and his prints that utilize his polaroids as subject matter. It is only when you look at the proofs for the rejected images that it is possible to fully see Warhol’s intended artistic vision as it developed between 1984 and1986, unimpeded by the external demands of his publishers. Indeed, when looking at the final selections for the portfolio of 10, each print on a white background, stark in their handling, Action Picture stands out as an appropriately titled scene.

In this impression, the coloration of brash red set against cool blues and light pink emphasizes the composition which bursts with the same intensity, urgency, and emotion present in Schreyvogel’s painting, but brought forward for the contemporary viewer in Warhol’s own distinctive style. While it may not fit with Gaultney and Klineman’s vision for the portfolio, Action Picture and the other experimental trial proofs for this series provide small clues to the innerworkings of Warhol’s vision and the potential trajectory of his artistic output exploring high art and mythmaking in a distinctly American artistic framework.