When Picasso died I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifet.mes and I thought, “Gee, I could do that in a day.” So i started. And then I found out, “Gee it takes more than a day to do four thousand pictures.” You see, the way I do them, with my technique, I really thought I could do four thousand in a day. And they’d all be masterpieces because they’d all be the same painting.
A spectacular convergence between two of history’s most significant artists – Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso – the present work, Head (After Picasso) from 1985, is an exceptional and conceptually profound work from the latter part of Andy Warhol’s career. In the mid-1980s, after two decades of re-establishing the definition of high art, and armed with the assurance of his own success as a major player of 20th century art, Warhol began to look at the encyclopedic inventory of old masters such as Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Matisse, Sandro Boticelli and of course Pablo Picasso, placing himself amongst their ranks. A profound exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1978 entitled, Art about Art, brought to the fore the abundance of art historical references in works by artist’s of Warhol’s own generation such as Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Furthermore, by this t.mes , the art of appropriation was flourishing in the hands of younger artists, particularly homages to Picasso, ranging from Robert Colescott’s re-contextualizing of race in Demoiselles d’Avignon (1985) or Mike Bidlo’s scrupulous imitation of Guernica (1984) and his Picasso Women show at Leo Castelli in 1988.
Right: Roy Lichtenstein, Woman with Flowered Hat, 1963. Private collects ion.
Warhol’s first foray in painting from the art historical canon was in 1963 when he reproduced Leonardo’s Mona Lisa – undoubtedly the most famous face in all of art history. Exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York the work attracted significant.mes dia attention, the fact of which drew in Andy Warhol more so than the painting itself. Warhol subsequently revisited many of the most renowned and recognised works in the history of art by Sandro Botticelli, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso by repainting, repeating, and renewing these masterpieces in his distinctive and revolutionary aesthetic. When asked whether there is a difference between images taken from advertising, as he had done in his works from the 1960s and 70s, and those taken from art history, Warhol stated, “They are both images. One relates to products, the other to people, or historical events. Both are means of communication… I watch advertising just as much as I go to museums.” (Warhol verso de Chirico, New York, 1982, pp. 48-49).
Following a period of collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the mid-1980s, Warhol’s enjoyment for painting was revived and led him to an intensive study of Picasso’s work which eventually culminated in this series of Head (After Picasso). Taking as his point of departure Pablo Picasso’s work on paper, Tête, from 1960 (Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol. XIX, no. 392, p. 188, illustrated), Warhol reproduced the image in vibrant reds, greens and yellows onto canvas. For this series, however, Warhol’s method differed significantly from his usual practice of screenprinting which had dominated his practice since the early 1960s. Here, Warhol instead projected a transparency onto the canvas of the black and white reproduction of Picasso’s original picture and sketched an outline of the enlargement. Rather than copying it intricately, Warhol instead used brushy and boldly interpretative strokes to retrace the contours and of the figure. The result is an almost poetic conflagration of the painterly and the precise. Warhol’s bold use of primary colors to present a Tête de femme which is so gesturally wrought results in something entirely unique. Neither entirely Warhol, nor entirely Picasso, Head (After Picasso) encourages us to think critically about Warhol’s artistic project. Here Warhol is encouraging us to reconsider portraiture, which historically in his output is a reflection on a particular person, a celebrity or society dilettante and their specific identity. In Head (After Picasso), Warhol is entirely redefining the context for this portrait, concerned with neither the identity of the sitter nor their comportment, but rather the loss of original identity through a physical and conceptual transformation.
“If Picasso, with his abundance of ideas, concentrated on the problem of redefining the portrait as a record of the artist’s personal responses to the subject and of transforming it from a purportedly objective document into a frankly subjective one, in this series Warhol was concerned neither with the identity of the person portrayed nor with the expression of his view of a person, but rather with the problem of the loss of identity of a picture through its transformation into different.mes dia.”
The present work is a powerful painting not only about admiration and appropriation, but also about Warhol’s relentless search for innovation even in the final years of his career. Warhol has memorably demonstrated the productive potential of appropriation where, through repetition, fresh perspectives of the past can be unearthed and released into new narratives. Created just two years before Warhol’s death, the present work not only evokes an artistic lineage between two artistic greats, but also bears an element of melancholia, looking backwards. Perhaps, Warhol’s citation of Picasso’s heads reinforces the original or perhaps lends greater value through its relationship to history. In either case, Warhol relies on the astonishment and thrill elicited by the resemblance.
Remaining in the Estate’s possession after Warhol’s death until its acquisition by the notable Jonathan O’Hara Gallery, and later Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac for the tremendous 1997 Andy Warhol Heads (After Picasso) exhibition, this is a rare painting from the limited series to come to market. After the exhibition, it remained in a private collects ion until its acquisition by Woodward Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood synonymous with many of Andy Warhol’s peers - Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Richard Hambleton, among many others. When it was in the collects ion of the Andy Warhol Foundation, the work was illustrated on the flyer for a Scholastic publication, emphasizing it's art historical importance and resonance. Thus, Head (After Picasso) is embedded in history in its formal characteristics rich in art historical references, but also the object’s specific history that weaves its own tale.
