Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Christie"s New York, Private Sales
Acquired from the above by the present owner
was created during the artist"s peak creative period, directly after his
series and at the height of Pop Art"s advent into the cultural conversation. It is said that Henry Geldzahler, the curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, himself was the one to introduce the motif to Warhol by pointing directly to a photograph of hibiscus flowers by Patricia Caulfield in
, after expressing some frustrations with the artist"s previous obsession with death.
The image immediately piqued Warhol"s interest, as he began reworking and modifying Caulfield"s photograph by cropping into the image to embolden the flowers themselves in both horizontal and vertical planes. The present work is a unique early example, and one of only a small number of impressions, of the artist"s experimentation with the flower image. This print gives insight into Warhol"s creative process that bore fruit to one of his and Pop Art"s most recognizable images. Here,
is stripped to its most fundamental form, with bold areas of black ink that almost recall a film still in Warhol"s search for the final form. The artist would go on to create several paintings and a series of prints from these subjects.