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168A
●
ANDY WARHOL
Grapes (Black)
.
Screenprint printed in black on Strathmore Bristol paper, 1979. 1016x762
mm; 40x30 inches, full margins.A unique trial proof of the black screen only,
before the color screens and diamond dust. Strathmore Bristol blind stamp,
lower right. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, NewYork. Published by Andy
Warhol Enterprises, Inc., NewYork. A richly-inked impression of this very
scarce proof.
Following his self-professed “retirement” from painting in 1966, Warhol
became very involved in the burgeoning prints market, establishing his own
printing/publishing company, Factory Additions, in NewYork, and producing
what is perhaps the largest, most recognized printed ouevres among his Pop
Art contemporaries. From the outset of his printmaking career he had
incorporated screenprinting, adopted from common advertising practices like
signage and poster making, further developing this rather mundane process,
from one edition to the next, with ever more complex results.
According to De Salvo,“One of the most conceptually provocative developments
of the 1970s was the greatly expanded use of unique edition prints,”
approximately two-thirds of Warhol’s screenprinted output of the 1970s is
unique editioned prints, “screenprints illustrating the subtle variations and
permutations that Warhol was able to achieve through his expanded notion
of the printing process.A unique print, with no duplicate, pushed the aesthetic
and economic boundaries that traditionally defined prints as identical units.
Although a precedent for Warhol’s method can certainly be found in artistic
uses of the monoprint, that process had not been intended to produce the
large numbers that were possible through silkscreen,” (Andy Warhol Prints,
NewYork, 1985, pp. 24-25).
Warhol’s repeated use of floral motifs in printmaking dates back to around
1961, when he produced one of his characteristic blotted-line ink drawings
of a basket filled with Mexican flowers, over which he hand-stamped
watercolor petals on the flowers, to secure an illustration commission from
Vogue
magazine.With his meteoric rise to international artistic popularity
in the early 1960s Warhol made one floral still life edition after another:
Flowers
, offset color lithograph, 1964, created to announce his exhibition at
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (see lot 168); the
Flowers
suite of 10 color
screenprints, 1970 (see lot 166); and the
Flowers
series of 10 black and white
screenprints, 1974, each with unique hand coloring in watercolor; culminating
in this series of
Grapes
, 1979, a suite of six differently arranged bunches of
grapes, branches and leaves overlayed with the artist’s signature blocks of
color and dark black contour lines. Feldman 191 (and 191 A).
[7,000/10,000]