Andy Warhol’s striking The Witch (From Myths) stands as a test.mes nt to Warhol’s undying fascination with popular culture and its role in shaping the American consciousness. Graphically rendered in bright, saccharin hues, the instantly recognizable form of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz emerges in black lines and bright green from the cotton candy pink colored background. Unmistakably one of the most iconic villains in the history of film, she is depicted mid-scream, or perhaps while laughing maniacally. Paint splatters and a light wash on the left of the canvas foretell the Witch’s watery annihilation at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Warhol intentionally draws upon cultural knowledge of the movie to imbue the painting with a sense of impending doom, juxtaposed with the vibrant tone of the color palette. While themes of death and destruction permeate the artist’s oeuvre–his Electric Chairs and Car Crashes foretell similar ends–the present work is lighthearted and upbeat. It recalls a shared cultural nostalgia rather than a collects ive trauma. Evidence of Warhol’s singular reverence for the ubiquity of American cultural production and mass media, The Witch (from Myths) is a premier example of Warhol’s work from his celebrated early 1980s period.

A unique piece from Warhol’s 1981 Myths series, the present work embodies the way Warhol’s work blends reality and fiction. The series, inspired by a doll the artist found at a flea market, refers not to the myths of ancient t.mes s, but the myths upon which contemporary American culture is founded. He originally planned to do a whole series of Disney characters, but settled on nine fictional characters, including Dracula, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, and Superman, as well as one image of Warhol himself. While Warhol is widely known for his portraits of real-life celebrities and prominent figures–from Marilyn Monroe to Mao Zedong–he did so using the stylistic signifiers of pop art, removing the images from the people themselves. In his Myths series, however, Warhol takes fictional subjects–including his own public persona–and brings them closer to life. By portraying these figures in the same manner as his portraits of real people, he pushes the characters of the American imagination into reality. As Christopher Makos describes: “in the case of the myth series, everyone could relate to the Wicked Witch, everybody could relate to Mickey Mouse and the other characters that were in the myth series…He took things that were readily accessible to all of us in the culture and made them even more accessible in the form of art works.” (Christopher Makos quoted in: Exh. Cat., The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland College Park, Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes, and Cultural Icons, February - April 1998, p. 37)

Further obfuscating the distinction between reality and fiction, Warhol based several of the myths on polaroid photos he took of people in cost.mes . The present work depicts the actress Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West opposite Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Warhol met Hamilton in 1980; he wrote in his diary on August 12: “I saw Margaret Hamilton, the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and got so excited and went over to her and told her how wonderful she was. She does the Maxwell House commercials now. She’s really small.” (Pat Hackett, ed., The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 314) He invited Hamilton to his studio for a photoshoot, where she donned a witch hat and cost.mes to pose for pictures. The reference image for The Witch shows Hamilton making the same screeching face as the eponymous witch in the painting. While the witch’s green face is distinctly of the character, her face itself–its expression and the curly hair bunching up around her ears–comes directly from Hamilton. The Witch (from Myths) is both a portrait of the classic character from 1939 and a portrait of Hamilton in 1980. Warhol intentionally blurs these lines, evoking–like many of his best known works do–the quintessentially modern iconography of cultural saturation.

In The Witch (from Myths), Warhol elevates the Witch–both the actor and the character–to mythic status, affirming their role in the canon of American life. His deep engagement with contemporary culture pervades Warhol’s oeuvre. The characters, real or fictional, who populate the American collects ive consciousness were of real importance to him. As Barry Blinderman wrote in 1981: “As an artist who represents an era in which advertising, film and TV are as great a source of heroes and villains as Homer or the Bible were for pre-media society, Warhol chose to update the classical order.” (Barry Blinderman quoted in: Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews 1962-1987, New York, 2004, p. 291)

Artist

Andy Warhol