"Venus", from: "Details of renaissance paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482)"
Signed in pencil and numbered 20/70. Colour screenprint, 1984. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York. Published by Editions Schellmann & Klüser, Munich/New York. I. 63,5 x 94 cm. S. 81 x 112 cm.
Provenance
According to information purchased from Galerie Börjeson, Malmö. Subsequently inherited by the current owner.
Literature
Feldman II 317.
More information
In February 1963, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was shown in America for the very first time. For four weeks, she was displayed in the sculpture hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her presence drew record crowds and sparked nationwide attention. The tremendous media frenzy surrounding the painting inspired Andy Warhol, who soon created his own versions of the portrait.
A few decades later, he returned to the Old Masters in his series Details of Renaissance Paintings (1984), reinterpreting works by artists such as Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The highlight of the series is Warhol’s variations on Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485–86). By cropping and isolating the goddess from her original mythological context, Warhol emphasizes her face and flowing hair as timeless symbols of beauty. His Venus becomes not only a Renaissance deity, but also a contemporary icon with the aura of a Hollywood star.
In the red version from 1984, Venus emerges against a pink background, with flaming red hair and luminous color accents that heighten her presence. Here, Pop Art’s serial techniques merge with a classical subject to create a new vision of divine beauty. Warhol’s Birth of Venus becomes a meeting point between two epochs, where Renaissance ideals are transformed into a modern visual language and a new, universal icon is born.
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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