"Chanel" from "Ads"
Silkscreen printed in colours, 1985, signed in pencil and numbered 158/190, printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York, and published by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., New York, and with their stamp on verso. I./S. 96.5 x 96.5 cm.
Provenance
Art Now Gallery, Gothenburg.
Literature
Feldman II. 354.
More information
The scene is the same as the show “Mad Men” – Madison Avenue in New York in the beginning of the 1950’s. The American dream is very much alive and for the consumers to buy all the products that’s produced the advertisement industry is booming. One of the new kids on the block is named Andy Warhol and he quickly becomes on of the highest payed freelance illustrators. His works is sought after by high end brands such as Christian Dior and Tiffany’s. He is also frequently published in Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and Vouge.
With this background the portfolio “Ads” from 1985 makes even more sense. The portfolio consists of ten original ads that Warhol has put his mark on. The portfolio was commissioned by Feldman Fine Arts and was one of the last portfolios that the artist created before his death in 1987. The “Ads” portfolio can be considered a kaleidoscope of Warhol’s life and work dealing with the major subjects for the artist.
“Chanel” is one of the most iconic brands in “Ads”. Marilyn Monroe, often portrayed by Warhol, once said she slept in nothing, but a few drops of the perfume which instantly put the brand in the same context as the female icon and all that she is associated with. The scent is also connected to sophistication, luxury and is the definition of “good taste”. In the work “Chanel” the viewer of the artwork is placed somewhere between art, commercialism and consumerism.
More about Andy Warhol
American artist, printmaker, and filmmaker. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1949 and began his career as an art director for the magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. His success in the advertising industry led to the Art Directors Club Medal in 1957.
Warhol is considered one of the leading figures of Pop Art. His artistic practice consists largely of portraits, often of well-known individuals, executed in silkscreen technique. He also worked with reproduced documentary images as well as installations in which everyday consumer objects, such as packaging, were given a central role. The underlying idea was that beauty and energy can be found everywhere in modern society, even in things often regarded as banal. As a result, detergent boxes and soup cans became artistic motifs. Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes were transformed through his work into some of the most iconic artworks of the 20th century.
From 1963 onward, he produced and participated in a large number of films in his own studio, The Factory, which simultaneously developed into an important meeting place for New York’s artistic and bohemian scene. Warhol continuously documented his surroundings with a film camera and later also a Polaroid camera. In his so-called Screen Tests, he filmed a number of internationally known figures, including Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí. According to his will, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established in New York in 1987, and in 1994 The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh.
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