Andy+Warhol

Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), more commonly known as **Andy Warhol**, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and public figure known for his membership in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame." In his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Andy Warhol Museum exists in memory of his life and artwork.

The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled //Eight Elvises.// The private transaction was reported in an article in //The Economist//, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market." $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved.

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**Lot Description**
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Mustard Race Riot acrylic, silkscreen ink and graphite on canvas 2 panels--panel with images: 113 7/8 x 82 in. (289.3 x 208.3 cm.) monochrome panel: 113¼ x 82 in. (287.7 x 208.3 cm.) overall: 113 7/8 x 164 in. (289.3 x 416.6 cm.) Painted in May-June 1963.

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**Pre-Lot Text**
Signs of Separation: The Socio-Political Climate of Andy Warhol's Mustard Race Riot (1963)

The tumultuous history of the fight for civil rights had been laid long before the appearance of Charles Moore's 1963 photographs in Life magazine, and their appropriation by Andy Warhol for his painting Mustard Race Riot produced in the same year. By the end of World War II, race relations had, in fact, occupied a central position in American life and politics. The historical reasons for this are many and include the impact of the vast demographic shift of African- Americans from the rural South to the industrialized centers of the North between 1915 and 1960; white flight to suburbs; the Cold War; the advent of television and a growing sophistication of media coverage; and the resurgence of black African nationalism. The 1950s and 1960s were volatile decades in which racial tension and social unrest dominated the lives and preoccupied the thoughts and actions of blacks and whites in the southern states, where Jim Crow laws and segregation policies were institutionalized. These laws, under the claim of "separate but equal," legally separated blacks from whites in the areas of education, housing, employment, public transportation, hospitals, libraries, courts, and even cemeteries. These were attempts by whites to deny the rights of citizenship to African-Americans by barring them from all areas of social and political life, and to instill in them a sense of fear and inferiority. The visual indicators of separation were everywhere in most southern states, particularly in public accommodations and in transportation services. Printed signboards marked "white" and "colored" dotted most public facilities such as toilets, restaurants, hospitals, waiting rooms, and water fountains.

Nineteen-fifty-four was critical in the early emergence of civil rights, for it was in that year that the Supreme Court ruled, in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that laws based on racial separation were unconstitutional, and therefore, unacceptable. This ruling would become the scourge of segregationists and the rallying point for civil rights activists and others in support of the movement during the 1960s.

Alabama was symbolically significant in the fight for civil rights, for it was in that state's most racially divided and socially volatile cities of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, where many marches, peaceful demonstrations, and boycotts were organized and successfully staged. By 1957, Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the place where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as president of the Confederacy in 1861, proudly labeled itself "the Cradle of the Confederacy" and became the key battleground in the struggle for civil rights. That effort started on a winter day in 1955, when a forty-two-year-old black seamstress named Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated Montgomery bus. The arrest sparked a year of protests and organized boycotts against Montgomery's public transportation system. These events were spearheaded by a young African-American minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), who had been, only one year earlier, appointed pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was in this small country chapel where King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a civil rights organization that would later play a crucial role in the civil rights revolution. It was King's leadership and organizational skills, in addition to his mastery of persuasive public speaking and determination in seeing the boycott through, that propelled him to prominence in the civil rights movement. In 1958, King was arrested, beaten, and jailed for civil disobedience. His apprehension and trial were highly publicized in print and in photographs, thus bringing the young minister and his trial to the attention of the nation.

Alabama was not the only southern state to rear its ugly racist head during the early 1960s. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy was at the helm in the White House when trouble erupted on the streets of Mississippi as a result of white resistance to twenty-eight-year-old veteran and African-American James H. Meredith's court-ordered admission to the all-white University of Mississippi (sentimentally referred to in that state as "Ole Miss"). The night before Meredith's expected attendance at the first day of classes, large mobs of angry whites formed and confronted U.S. marshals who were ordered to protect him. The administration building was pelted with rocks, gunfire, and fire bombs. The marshals, who were ordered not to fire into the mob, responded with teargas and nightsticks. The confrontation left two men dead and many wounded. The next day, surrounded by federal troops sent in to quell the violence, Meredith was escorted, without incident, to his first day of classes. Once Meredith had been enrolled, Ole Miss was officially integrated. The following week, the Ole Miss incident was brought to visual and verbal life in the pages of Life magazine, thus adding steam to the furnace of change.

The Ole Miss incident was just the beginning of more volatile events yet to come. In the Spring of 1963, the civil rights struggle came to a critical head, this time in Birmingham, Alabama, when Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed for organizing anti-segregation demonstrations. King was placed in solitary confinement and it was from there that he wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," outlining his philosophy of nonviolence and civil disobedience that had been patterned on the strategies, techniques, and philosophy of pacifism preached by Mohandas Gandhi. Three days after King was released, a postman named William Moore from Baltimore, embarked upon a solitary march against segregation through the South. He was shot and killed on a remote stretch of highway near Attalla, Alabama. His murder attracted national attention and moved ten volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)-two of three civil rights groups (the third being King's SCLC)-to follow Moore's route through the South as a form of commemoration and public protest against his murder. The marchers were harassed by whites along the way and were arrested in Alabama by state policemen using cattle prods. This event, called "The Freedom March," attracted many journalists and photographers whose national reporting publicized the affair and won over sympathizers to the civil rights cause.

The zenith of national outrage against segregation and state-sponsored repression of those lobbying for justice, came to a head with the national publicizing of the events of May 3, 1963 in Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park. On that day and for five days thereafter, white firemen from Birmingham attempted to disperse groups of young black demonstrators by turning on high-pressured firehoses against them. In an effort to put down the protest, the segregationist Birmingham Police Commissioner, Eugene (Bull) Connor, ordered police to use attack dogs to disperse the crowd. Scenes of vicious dogs biting into the flesh of the demonstrators, of powerful jets of water knocking men, women, and children to the ground and ripping the clothes off their bodies were photographed by white photojournalist Charles Moore and reported to the nation in an eleven-page lead story in Life magazine (May 17, 1963), then the country's largest and most popular weekly magazine. The story and the photographs were shocking to the rest of the nation and have become etched into the American psyche as the strongest symbols of the struggle for racial equality and civil liberties. The story and the images helped rally the rest of the country in opposing the vicious and racist tactics of southern segregationists. However, such gruesome events did not stop the subsequent onslaught of marches and acts of racial violence that ensued in other parts of Alabama and in other southern states. Case in point, a little over a month after the Kelly Ingram Park riots, an NAACP leader from Mississippi, Medgar W. Evers, was gunned down by a sniper's bullet in Jackson. Two months later, in August of 1963, more than a quarter of a million people, both black and white, poured into Washington, D. C. in a march and demonstration to promote "jobs and freedom," and to support a pending civil rights bill. This famous event, called the March on Washington, brought together important black and white leaders and celebrities from around the country and came to a climax with King's "I Have A Dream" speech. That triumph was only followed by tragedy with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. His murder not only shocked and numbed the nation, but also rekindled determination to see civil rights legislation signed into law. That hope was fulfilled when President Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1964, signed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination at the voting polls, in schools, public facilities, and places of employment. To test the validity and sincerity of the bill's passage, there was a concerted effort by civil rights leaders to register black voters. Mississippi was chosen to serve as the testing ground for voter registration. In the summer of 1964, around nine hundred volunteers, most of them white students from northern colleges, were sent to Mississippi to help register black voters. White Mississippians reacted by setting a black church on fire, and by kidnapping, beating, and killing three young voter registration volunteers who were on their way to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to sign up voters.

The drive for voter registration extended throughout the rural South and was of prime importance to Martin Luther King, Jr. who, at the very beginning of 1965, went to Selma, Alabama, to direct a voter registration campaign there. Selma was a prime location for such civil rights activity, for only a very small percent of that city's black majority population was registered to vote. King's arrival in Selma provoked the anger of many whites. There were demonstrations, beatings, and arrests. King then decided to lead a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to petition Governor George Wallace to protect blacks seeking to register to vote. Wallace turned a deaf ear to King's petition and on March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers halted and then assaulted the marchers with teargas and billy clubs. This event came to be known as "Bloody Sunday" and was soon thereafter followed by a related march to the county courthouse in Montgomery where demonstrators were charged by deputies on horseback and savagely beaten with batons.

The Selma March eventually resulted in passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The men and women who put their lives on the front lines for civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s have prompted America to confront its Judeo-Christian conscience and to bring into line its rhetoric of "with liberty and justice for all" with swift and just action. Clearly, the 1950s and 1960s were unpleasant and uncomfortable decades in the social and political lives of many Americans. Nevertheless, they constituted a necessary period of growing pains for a young democracy. Charles Moore's memorable photographs of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of that turbulent era help us jog our memories, recount and relive our past, and relay a history that is not only troubling, but also meaningful and hopefully rewarding to our future.

James Smalls, Ph. D. Associate Professor of Art History and Theory University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Warhol, Death, and Disaster Trevor Fairbrother

In a widely read interview published in Artnews in November 1963, Warhol announced: "My show [at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend] in Paris is going to be called 'Death in America.' I'll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures." Thus, just as the media were pigeonholing him as a wacky new painter of upbeat American commodities - Campbell's canned soup, Marilyn Monroe, Coca Cola, and Elvis Presley - Warhol gave voice to a hard-bitten interest in the unsavory flipside of the American Dream. Through his art he mirrored back to the world the tragic episodes of desperation, compulsive consumerism, and glaring social inequality that were daily fare in the Information Age. To make things even more confusing, Warhol chose to play the part of a cool, bewigged Pop pundit who made only ambivalent or quirky comments. By polarizing his audience into outraged detractors and uncritical devotees he became the most newsworthy artist of his day. For example, at the beginning of the 1963 interview, when Warhol said "I think everyone should be a machine," it was unclear whether he was espousing some revolutionary form of equality or sketching a Kafkaesque existential nightmare.

Warhol made his first of his "Death and Disaster" works in the summer of 1962. With the help of an opaque projector he translated a front page of the New York Mirror into the monumental, hand-painted image of his picture 129 Die In Jet. This gaunt, brusquely rendered black and white canvas, over eight feet in height, gave artistic permanence to one example from a never-ending stream of banner headlines. By denying the ephemerality of tabloid journalism and throw-away commercial products it became a grand, symbolic commemoration of late-twentieth-century tragedy. In the course of the next two years Warhol created a striking array of pictures devoted to the grim, dispiriting, and mournful realities of life in modern, industrialized America: an electric chair in Sing Sing Prison; corpses amidst the wreckage of crashed cars; suicide victims; people killed by contaminated canned food; quasi-religious tributes to Marilyn Monroe in the aftermath of her suicide; an atomic explosion; a funeral for a gangster; and the brutal treatment of civil rights protesters in Alabama. By turning to silkscreens to reproduce authentic journalistic images on the surface of painted canvases Warhol gave all these subjects an air of grating ambivalence: painful photographic "truth" hijacked by art and artifice.

The three photographs by Charles Moore that Warhol reproduced in Mustard Race Riot were the most historically focused images in his "Death and Disasters" repertoire: they extended the life of an incident in Alabama that had violently jolted public opinion, thanks to the reporting by Life magazine. Warhol's other works under this broad umbrella were perhaps more focused on the routine ghastliness of his times, namely capital punishment, fatal accidents, and angst. With hindsight it is clear that the greater part of Warhol's painted oeuvre has a connection to the theme of mortality. In addition to the notion of sustenance, his pictures of mass-produced food items suggested the cycles of economic life and consumer loyalty. His pictures of celebrities inevitably evoked the brief heyday of a professional career, and the portraits he produced on commission glamorously stopped the march of time. The shooting of Warhol in 1968 brought him close to death, underscoring his unflinching obsessions with doom and glamour, and inspiring regularly returns to "Death and Disaster" themes. Sometimes his approach was alarmingly blunt, as in the series of paintings devoted to skulls, knives, guns, and crosses. Even when he produced pictures that were endearingly decorative and ironically "abstract" he dealt with richly symbolic subjects and materials: brooding shadows; the silhouettes of eggs; tangled webs of yarn; drips and splashes of urine; baroque remakes of Rorschach tests; and camouflage designs he explored to when AIDS took hold. In 1986, for what were to be his last self-portraits, Warhol turned his own face into a harrowing evocation of the endless struggle between life and death.

In America, the ruminative book of photographs and essays Warhol completed in 1985, the artist remarked: "I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'" His comment is a great help to seeing and understanding the role of empty space in his "Death and Disaster" works. In many of the classic single-canvas pictures from the 1960s Warhol carefully left areas of the composition blank, drawing attention to the background on which his silkscreened figments were floating. Thus, in the electric chair painting Triple Silver Disaster (1963) he left more than two-thirds of the surface a haunting and beautiful expanse of "blank" silver paint. In the case of Mustard Race Riot Warhol took empty space to its formal extreme: one half of the diptych is wallpapered with photographic images, the other half is a stark monochrome. This conceit greatly increased the visual, conceptual, and poetic strengths of Mustard Race Riot. On the order Warhol submitted to his commercial supplier he had written a note about the way he wanted the silkscreens of the three Birmingham photographs to look: "Ple[a]se make contrasts very black & white." He had an intuitive sense about the kind of statement he would be making, and Mustard Race Riot is perhaps its ultimate expression: the grainy images of police brutality fill their space to chaotic excess, recalling, perhaps, a printing press that ran amok or a firmly bricked-up window; the blank pendant, on the other hand, stands as an impassive expression of elimination, absolution, and silent nothingness. In the mid 1980s I worked with Warhol and his staff to purchase a large red Electric Chair painting for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was eager to make a blank for this 1963 canvas, noting that he had originally wanted it to be a diptych. He said that the "blank" could by hung on either side of the silkscreened panel, it could by placed on a different wall in the same room, or the canvas with the electric chair images could be hung alone. Mustard Race Riot is that rare thing: a vintage diptych with its original "blank." In the broadest sense the two parts of the picture allude philosophically to an endless cycle in which troubles come and go.

Trevor Fairbrother's interview with Andy Warhol was published in Arts Magazine in February 1987. He organized the exhibition Beuys and Warhol: the artist as shaman and star for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1991. His essays on Warhol include one about the book America, written for Jonathan P. Binstock's exhibition catalogue Andy Warhol: Social Observer (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2000). ) Trevor Fairbrother 2004

Property from a Private New York Collection

Provenance
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Jones, Washington, D.C.

Literature
//Andy Warhol//, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1965, no. 10 (illustrated without monochrome panel). //Andy Warhol//, exh. cat., Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1968, n.p. (illustrated without monochrome panel). R. Crone, //Andy Warhol//, New York, 1970, no. 408 (illustrated). R. Crone and W. Wiegand, //Diie revolutionäre Äesthetik: Andy Warhols//, Darmstadt, 1972, p. 81 (illustrated). J. H. Müller, T. Osterwold, et. al., //Realität-Realismus-Realität//, Wuppertal, 1972, p. 99 (illustrated without monochrome panel). R. Crone, //Das Bildnerische Werk Andy Warhols//, Berlin, 1976, no. 725. //Andy Warhol: Death and Diasters//, exh. cat., Menil Collection, Houston, 1988, no. 27 (illustrated in color). //Andy Warhol: A Retrospective//, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, no. 277 (illustrated in color). M. Yonekura, //Great Contemporary Masters Vol. 12 Andy Warhol//, Tokyo, 1993, no. 31 (illustrated in color). R. Wolf, //Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s//, Chicago, 1997, pl. 4, fig. 51 (illustrated in color). G. Frei and N. Printz, //Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963//, New York, 2000, vol. I, p. 383, no. 422 (illustrated in color, p. 381). R. Storr, //Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977//, New York, 2000, p. 83 (illustrated in color without monochrome panel).

Exhibited
Toronto, Jerrold Morris International Gallery, //Andy Warhol//, 1965. Vancouver Art Gallery; Regina, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, and Montreal, Museé d'Art Contemporain, //New York 13//, January-July 1969, n.p. (illustrated in color). New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, //Andy Warhol//, September-October 1969. Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, //Andy Warhol// (organized by the Pasadena Museum of Art), July-September 1970. Milwaukee Art Museum and Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, //Warhol-Beuys-Polke//, June-November 1987, no. 9 (illustrated in color).

Lot Notes
"It was just something that caught my eye", Warhol responded somewhat typically when asked about the seemingly contentious political subject matter of his //Race Riot// paintings. Of all of the subjects in Warhol's vast and varied catalogue, the so-called //Race Riot// paintings with their manifest display of political violence and racial oppression are seemingly the least ambiguous and most partisan images in his //oeuvre//. Repeatedly showing the image of a black Civil Rights protester being savaged by the dogs of a group of white uniformed policemen, this memorable and extremely rare series of paintings seems to demonstrate the famously apolitical Warhol actively engaging in contemporary politics and making a rare, if not indeed unique,"liberal statement" with his art. But, as Warhol himself was at pains to point out, engaging with 1960s politics was not really his intention. As he told fellow "Pop" artist Claes Oldenburg it was, largely "indifference" that had characterized and determined his choice of this graphic and provocative subject matter.

First executed in the spring of 1963, Warhol's //Race Riot// paintings were created as part of a series of works based on the theme of //Death in America// that he was preparing for an exhibition to be held under the same title at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1964. Consisting of what is now known more accurately as his //Death and Disaster// series of paintings, the //Death in America// exhibition was to consist of a number of large-scale works on the theme of various typically American ways to die. Foremost among these images were of course, Warhol's graphic and shocking images of car crashes. These were accompanied by a select group of paintings of suicides, gangster funerals and electric chairs. The image of the //Race Riot// was, while not an image of death per se, a provocative and powerful image of a peculiarly American form of violence, segregation and political oppression. It fitted well into the context of an exhibition in which Warhol deliberately intended to present a grittier film-noir-like portrait of America. Anxious about the reception of his art in Paris for what would prove to be his first ever European one-man-show, Warhol feared an overly critical reaction to the seemingly overt celebration of mass-consumerism in his soup cans, coca-cola bottles, star-portraits and dollar-bills. In choosing a series of works on the subject of //Death in America// he hoped to court a favorable reaction from a French audience by presenting a series of works outlining the traumatic flip-side of the American Dream.

Warhol's choice of subject matter was also a continuation of a theme that had first surfaced while he was painting the Marilyns. It was around this time that he first recognized how the constant repetition of imagery ultimately seems to nullify the shocking effect of even the most horrific of images. This was an element that Warhol was keen to both expose and explore. "When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn't really have any effect", he observed, constant repetition deconstructs the meaning of an image and reveals its true artificial nature as merely a banal abstract surface.

The exploration of the desensitizing of the audience and the nullification of meaning through repeated imagery is what distinguishes Warhol's //Death and Disaster// series most. It is also primarily this feature of these still disturbing and justly famous works that lends them their troubling ambiguity. As with his //Campell Soup// cans, the viewer is left in front of these powerful paintings wondering whether the artist is celebrating or criticizing his subject matter. No answer is given because, through the impersonal anonymity of the silkscreen-painting technique, the artist's presence and authorship remains seemingly absent or at best indifferent.

With his //Race Riot// paintings Warhol took this feature of his work even further imbuing one of the most contentious subjects in contemporary politics with the same ambiguity and sense of authorless indifference. At the same time, the //Race Riot// paintings again reveal Warhol's unerring, almost prophetic ability to select, isolate and transform a single image into a provocative and quizzical icon that stands as a symbol for an entire area of contemporary culture. Seeming to encapsulate the whole concept of violence and injustice in one unforgettable image, Warhol's //Race Riots// are in fact portentious icons of the entire cycle of protest and political violence into which 1960s America was later to descend. It was a cycle that would lead to the increasing politicisation of America's youth throughout the decade and which would spill over into the tragic violence of 1968 culminating in the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and indeed,(within his own small circle), with the near-fatal shooting of Warhol himself.

Like the photographs of the naked Vietnamese girl running screaming from a napalm attack or the South Vietnamese Army Captain on the street of Saigon shooting a young suspect in the head - two still images that have burnt themselves into the collective memory and become icons of the Vietnam War - so too has the image of Warhol's //Race Riot// come to stand as an icon of America's Civil Rights conflict. Selected by Warhol from a feature in //Life// magazine, his //Race Riot// paintings make use, in fact, not of one image but of three sequential shots. In Warhol's hands, the three images are used as a kind of filmic montage in such a way that they seem to combine in the mind to form a single unforgettable archetype of racial injustice and state-endorsed oppression. As with the two Vietnam pictures, so provocative is this image that it is nigh on impossible to view Warhol's //Race Riot// paintings objectively, to see its repeated imagery without engaging with its subject matter. Yet this is precisely what Warhol asks us to do in these works. Taking an up-to-the-minute and morally repugnant contemporary image of stark clarity and disturbing power, Warhol's //Race Riots// expose and explore the bounds of the viewer's ability to recognize imagery as an artificial reproduction created without feeling, impersonally and mechanically.

Created in the spring of 1963, Warhol's //Race Riot// paintings were an immediate and perhaps impulsive response to a feature that Warhol saw in //Life// magazine entitled "The Dogs' Attack is the Negro's Reward" which appeared on May 17 of that year. Consisting of the three photographs which Warhol later incorporated variously into his paintings of the subject, the article outlined the one-sided violence at a peaceful Civil Rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama. After months of coordinated sit-ins and nonviolent demonstrations organised by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under the plan known as "Project C" ("C" standing for confrontation), the city's director of public safety, Eugene ("Bull") Connor, responded, as anticipated, and rose to the demonstrators' bait. Ordering the use of police dogs and fire hoses to end the protest he commanded a violent put-down of the protest. The result was a major media coup that garnered national attention and generated widespread public sympathy for the cause of desegregation.

The specifics of the conflict almost certainly mattered little to Warhol. What was important from his point of view was the contentiousness of the imagery and the way in which it encapsulated a unique and bestial form of violence. Talking to Gene Swenson in November 1963, Warhol referred to these works as "the dogs in Birmingham" and in a sketch for his later series of "little Race Riots" he showed he had forgotten the location of the violence by referring to these images incorrectly as "Mongomerty (sic), dog, Negro". //Mustard Race Riot// the largest and finest of this rare series of only four paintings from 1963, was also inaccurately entitled //Selma// when it was exhibited at the ICA, Philadelphia in 1965. Whether it was Birmingham, Selma or Montgomery, the location of the imagery clearly remained unimportant to Warhol. As with his other //Death and Disaster// images, all that mattered was the provocative and disturbing power of the imagery.

//Mustard Race Riot// is the major example from Warhol's //Race Riot// series and conceptually the closest to his other //Death and Disaster// paintings. A double canvas image, blank mustard color on one side and fully-saturated mustard-backed imagery on the other, it relates closely to Warhol's other double-canvas paintings that incorporate a monochrome canvas alongside a silk-screened one. David Bourdon has pointed out that these "diptychs" were first created at Warhol's Firehouse studio after Warhol had asked his friends, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to add a blank panel?" , adding, " It would make the painting twice as big and twice as expensive." (D. Bourdon, //Andy Warhol//, New York, 1989, p. 158.) "Warhol's imagination" Bourdon wrote, "was fired by the possibility that he could persuade collectors to buy an 'empty' monochrome unit, a notion that appealed to the Rumplestiltskin in him. If he could stencil pictures of dollar bills and convert them into actual cash, why couldn't he sell blank canvases?" (Ibid.)

As with the //Death and Disaster// series the concept of a diptych consisting of one screened and one blank canvas seems to have originated while Warhol was working on the Marilyns and was inaugurated with his //Gold Marilyn// tondo diptych. It is however primarily with the car crashes and the electric chairs of the //Death and Disaster// series that Warhol makes use of this new technique. Apart from any pleasure Warhol may have gained from being able to sell abstract monochrome canvases, it is clear from these works that the blank canvas also performs an added and important function. Contrasting the emptiness of one canvas with the fullness of the provocative and disturbing imagery on the other underscores Warhol's intention of exposing the artifice of even the most horrific images and lends these "diptychs" a powerful existential gravitas that is less evident in his single-canvas images. As both a design feature and as a reinforcement of Warhol's conceptual concerns, the play between empty space and dense repetitive silk-screened imagery in these works, visually reiterates the sense of shallowness and artifice that underlies all Warhol's work.

In //Mustard Race Riot// this contrast is extreme throwing into opposition a completely covered left-hand panel with an empty monochrome right one. Sequentially layering the three different images of the Birmingham riot, the violent images are bricked together covering the entire left-hand canvas so that they appear like wallpaper. In the juxtaposition of the dense, frantic, sensational, shocking contemporary imagery on the first panel with absolutely nothing on the second, Warhol appears to pose an existential question about the nature of the difference between the two.

[|Carter Horsley]
Lot 12, “Mustard Race Riot,” is a large painting by Andy Warhol that was executed in May and June, 1963. An acrylic, silkscreen ink and graphite on canvas, it consists of two panels, one with images, on the left, that measures 113 1/4 by 82 inches, and the other, on the right, that is monochrome and measures 113 7/8 by 82 inches.

If good-natured humor permeates Cattelan’s work, it is largely absent from Warhol’s except in the reverse/perverse way.

Warhol, of course, most likely found much of his success hilarious but the content and intent of much of his oeuvre tends to be on the darker rather than lighter side. This work is the largest of a series of four “race riot” works by Warhol. It consists of the repetitive use by Warhol of three photographs by Charles Moore that appeared in the May 17, 1963 issue of Life magazine in an article about the use of police dogs by Sheriff “Bull” O’Connor during a civil rights protest in Montgomery, Alabama.

The long catalogue entry argues that Warhol’s interest in the civil rights pictures was not primarily political:

“’It was just something that caught my eye,’ Warhol responded somewhat typically when asked about the seemingly contentious political subject matter of his //Race Riot// paintings. Of all of the subjects in Warhol’s vast and varied catalogue, the so-called //Race Riot// paintings with their manifest display of political violence and racial oppression are seemingly the least ambiguous and most partisan images in his oeuvre. Repeatedly showing the image of a black Civil Rights protester being savaged by the dogs of a group of white uniformed policemen, this memorable and extremely rare series of paintings seems to demonstrate the famously apolitical Warhol actively engaging in contemporary politics and making a rare, if not indeed unique, ‘liberal statement’ with his art. But, as Warhol himself was at pains to point out, engaging with 1960s politics was not really his intention. As he told fellow ‘Pop” artist Claes Oldenburg it was, largely ‘indifference’ that had characterized and determined his choice of this graphic and provocative subject matter.

First executed in the spring of 1963, Warhol’s //Race Riot// paintings were created as part of a series of works based on the theme of //Death in America// that he was prepared for an exhibition to be hold under the same title at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1964. Consisting of what is now known more accurately as his //Death and Disaster// series of paintings, the //Death in America// exhibition was to consist of a number of large-scale works on the theme of various typically American ways to die. Foremost among these images were of course, Warhol’s graphic and shocking images of car crashes. These were accompanied by a select group of paintings of suicides, gangster funerals and electric chairs. The image of the //Race Riot// was, while not an image of death //per se,// a provocative and powerful image of a peculiarly American form of violence, segregation and political oppression. It fitted well into the context of an exhibition in which Warhol deliberately intended to present a grittier film-noir-like portrait of America. Anxious about the reception of his art in Paris for what would prove to be his first ever European one-man-show, Warhol feared an overly critical reaction to the seemingly overt celebration of mass-consumerism in his soup cans, coca-cola bottles, star-portraits and dollar-bills.

In choosing a series of works on the subject of //Death in America// he hoped to court a favorable reaction from a French audience by presenting a series of works outlining the traumatic flip-side of the American Dream. Warhol’s choice of subject matter also a continuation of a theme that had first surfaced while he was painting the Marilyns. It was around this time that he first recognized how the constant repetition of imagery ultimately seems to mollify the shocking effect of even the most horrific of images. This was an element that Warhol was keen to both expose and explore. ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn’t really have any effect,’ he observed, constant repetition deconstructs the meaning of an image and reveals it true artificial nature as merely a banal abstract surface. The exploration and the desensitizing of the audience and the nullification of meaning through repeated imagery is what distinguishes Warhol’s //Death and Disaster// series most. It also primarily this feature of these still disturbing and justly famous works that lends them their troubling ambiguity.…A double canvas image, blank mustard color on one side and fully-saturated mustard-backed imagery on the other, it relates closely to Warhol’s other double-canvas paintings that incorporate a monochrome canvas alongside a silk-screened one. David Bourdon has pointed out that these ‘diptychs’ were first created at Warhol’s Firehouse studio after Warhol had asked his friends, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to add a blank panel?’ adding, ‘It would make the painting twice as big and twice as expensive.’…Apart from any pleasure Warhol may have gained from being able to sell abstract monochrome canvases, it is clear from these works that the blank canvas also performs an added and important function. Contrasting the emptiness of one canvas with the fullness of the provocative and disturbing imagery on the other underscores Warhol’s intention of exposing the artifice of even the most horrific images and lends these ‘diptychs’ a powerful existential gravitas that is less evident in his single-canvas images. As both a design feature and as a reinforcement of Warhol’s conceptual concerns, the play between empty space and dense repetitive silk-screened imagery in these works, visually reiterates the sense of shallowness and artifice that underlies all Warhol’s work.”

These arguments are a bit disingenuous as Warhol was astute and sophisticated, perhaps as much as any New Yorker of his generation after he gained fame. Provocation was his sincerest form of flattery.

Repetition breeds boredom? Perhaps. But it does not follow necessarily that horrific images lose their impact in repetition and deconstructivist theory does not make multiple horrific images necessarily “banal abstract surface.” Clearly, Warhol did not choose his images randomly especially for the 1964 exhibit. The double canvases may appear to some as “existential gravitas,” but to others they are not imbued with any deep aesthetic. The blanks do distract from the “horrific” images, but they do not add much besides imbalance, which is not to say that there is not historical interest in a “Pop” artist dealing with serious issues.

The lot has an “estimate on request” that was $12,000,000 to $15,000,000. **It sold for $15,127,500, a bit short of the artist's auction record of $17,050,000.**

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