Electric chair
| Blue Electric Chair |
|---|
| Andy Warhol , 1963 |
| Screen printing on acrylic on canvas |
| 266.7 x 203.8 cm |
|
Saatchi Collection , London
Link to the picture |
| Orange Disaster # 5 |
|---|
| Andy Warhol , 1963 |
| Screen printing on acrylic on canvas |
| 266.7 x 203.8 cm |
|
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , New York
Link to the picture |
| Big Electric Chair |
|---|
| Andy Warhol , 1967 |
| Screen printing on acrylic on canvas |
| 137.2 x 187.9 cm |
|
Link to the picture |
Electric Chair is a screen printing series by the American Pop Art artist Andy Warhol from 1963. The motif belongs to Warhol's series of Death and Disaster paintings and was printed in numerous color variations. According to the color scheme, the electric chair motif can be found under titles such as Orange Disaster , Lavender Disaster , Blue Electric Chair and others. a.
description
The initial motif shows an electric chair in a large room. There is a table behind the chair. On the upper right wall is a sign with the words "SILENCE" in capital letters.
The screen prints were made in different sizes, sometimes Warhol repeated the motif umpteen times on the canvas. As in the Marilyn Diptych from 1962 and many other works, he accepted generation losses, color overlays or smears as stylistic devices. In some versions, such as the 1963 Blue Electric Chair , a diptych in silver, blue and black, he contrasted the screen prints with a colored surface without a motif as a counterpoint. After 1963, however, Warhol only rarely printed several copies on one canvas in order to give collectors the opportunity to line up any number of individual panels. Warhol was no longer interested in the distribution of the individual images and thus the dimensions.
The first series from 1963 are mostly monochrome , in black printing ink on a colored acrylic background, the following series are often multicolored. In later years Warhol used enlargements that only show the chair, such as the Big Electric Chair from 1967. He partially inverted the print, as in the 1971 series Electric Chairs or in the Reversals , the inversions of his best-known motifs from 1979. In the Big Electric Chair Painting (Reversal Series) , for example, 26 by 7 electric chairs are arranged like contact sheets and resemble a wallpaper pattern.
background
At the time the picture was taken, New York State law provided for the execution of the death penalty in the electric chair. Warhol took up the subject at a time when the moral question of the death penalty was being debated very controversially in New York. The "modern way" of execution due to power surges appeared Warhol as a "typical American" of killing. So he got a photograph of the Sing Sing Detention Center's electric chair . From this template he produced a large number of pictures. He printed the image of the chair on monochrome backgrounds in fashion colors (lavender, pink, orange, etc.), which “looked like a perverse confrontation” ( David Bourdon ).
The last electric chair execution took place in Sing Sing on August 15, 1963. 641 people were executed here between 1891 and 1963, among them the married couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953.
The Death and Disaster paintings
"It occurred to me that everything I was working on had to do with death."
The Electric Chair prints are part of Warhol's series of Death and Disaster paintings , which deal with the subject of "Death in America". Warhol first took up the morbid subject in 1962 with the still hand-worked acrylic painting 129 Die in Jet , which represents a turning point in Warhol's work. From then on, he produced a large number of images that deal with every imaginable form of "disaster", catastrophe and sudden death . The Car Crash series from the same year shows traffic accidents .
Warhol's then gallery owner Eleanor Ward didn't care for the Disaster series and refused to exhibit it in her stable gallery ; however, she sold a few copies from her inventory. Warhol rescheduled and showed the works in 1964 in Ileana Sonnabend's gallery in Paris . In view of the possible rejection of the American way of life by the French public, Warhol now increasingly relied on memento-mori subjects, which depicted death à l'américaine . So he obtained extensive photographic material of blood crimes, suicides , traffic accidents and every other conceivable form of violence , misfortune and death in America.
Other well-known works in the 1963 series include 1947 White , which shows a woman who jumped from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building , lying dead on a car roof; Bellevue II and Suicide , both of which are also about death leaps , and Tunafish Disaster, about the death of two women who died of fish poisoning from eating superimposed tuna ; also Race Riot , a series about the race riots in Birmingham , Alabama , the photos of which were taken from Life Magazine . Another subject, Atomic Bomb , which shows the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima , had a certain meaning for Warhol, since the date coincided with his seventeenth birthday, August 6, 1945.
Considerations
Warhol's contemporary Claes Oldenburg did not see the works as a statement on a political situation, but as evidence of the artist's indifference . When asked about the picture about the race riots, Warhol only replied that it was actually indifference, that he had only chosen the photo "because he had just noticed it."
On the occasion of the first posthumous Andy Warhol exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1987, Petra Kipphoff commented in the time :
“Andy Warhol does not show death, but types of death, and with the types of death also not people, but the ways of life belonging to them. He is not interested in death as an individual experience, as the fate of the individual, but as a second-hand sensation. He works directly and at the same time from the distance of what is second-hand informed. "
The Berliner Zeitung wrote on the occasion of the Warhol retrospective in the Neue Nationalgalerie 2001: “This artist had an unmistakable feeling for the mood of the times. If you wander through the retrospective, especially through the lush disaster pictures, the plane and car accidents, the electric chairs, the atomic bombs and the suicides, then you can't help but wonder how Warhol would have reacted to the pictures of September 11th, the became the American catastrophe icons in the seconds of their creation. "
Collections
Warhol's Electric Chair screen prints are in numerous public collections, such as the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris , the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London , the New York Guggenheim Museum , the Museum of Modern Art , and the Indianapolis Museum of Art , in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra or in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm , which showed the first major Warhol retrospective in Europe in 1968.
In December 2005, the Museum für Gegenwart at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin acquired a Great Electric Chair from 1967 for the (unofficial) price of around 5.5 million euros from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation , although the work was already on permanent loan from the art collector Erich Marx from the Year was 1996. The columnists praised the acquisition as an “enrichment of the Berlin collections” ( Berliner Morgenpost ), but criticized the “painfully high amount” of the purchase price. ( FAZ )
literature
- Gerard Malanga , Peter Halley: Andy Warhol - Little Electric Chair Paintings . Stellan Holm Gallery, New York 2002, ISBN 0-9711687-0-9
- Reva Wolf: Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s . University of Chicago Press, 1997, ISBN 0-226-90491-1 .
- David Bourdon : Warhol . DuMont, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-7701-2338-7 , pp. 150-158.
Web links
- Andy Warhol's Electric Chair on warhol.org (English)
- Guy Cheli's 'Sing Sing Prison' The Electric Chair Page (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ David Bourdon: Warhol , p. 158
- ↑ a b Petra Kipphoff: ways of life, types of death . In: Die Zeit , No. 46/1987
- ^ David Bourdon: Warhol , p. 154
- ^ David Bourdon: Warhol , p. 142
- ↑ David Bourdon: Warhol , pp. 150–151
- ^ David Bourdon: Warhol , p. 156
- ↑ Sebastian Preuss: Now comes the temple walk - To the Andy Warhol retrospective in the Neue Nationalgalerie . In: Berliner Zeitung , October 8, 2001
- ↑ Uta Baier: Warhol's “Big Electric Chair” now belongs to Berlin . In: Berliner Morgenpost , April 28, 2006
- ↑ Nikals Maak: On a hot chair. FAZ.net, April 27, 2006, accessed January 3, 2009 .
