R eflecting the awe and fear of venturing into the unknown, Andy Warhol’s Astronauts comes from what is arguably the most important year in his entire output, and at its astounding scale marks it as a major and exceptional vestige of the artist’s early career. Its execution is contemporaneous with the epoch-defining ‘Death and Disaster’ series of Suicides, Car Crashes, Electric Chairs, Tunafish Disasters, Race Riots, as well as the Silver Elvis and Silver Liz canons, all of which were similarly made in 1963. Astronauts combines a comic book science fiction fantasy that evokes Warhol’s early career in popular advertising with the dawn of the actual Space Age, which so dramatically captured the public imagination at the beginning of the 1960s.

Fueled by the geopolitical superpower rivalry of the Cold War, six weeks after the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, President John F. Kennedy had declared on May 25, 1961, that the United States would land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. American dedication to space exploration was consequently manifest through the NASA Apollo era, and their earliest missions paralleled an explosive fascination with the ‘Final Frontier’ through the ever-expanding media of television, film, and comics. It is from this rich iconographic seam that Warhol mined the source image for the present work, thereafter reappraising this semi-fantastical popular imagination through the repetition of his revolutionary silkscreen.

Warhol had initiated the enterprise that has become synonymous with his legendary output —silkscreening— in 1962. The technique immediately appealed to the artist, affording spectacular effects of tonal contrast and a grainy dispersion of ink that connotes high-volume mass-media printing reproduction techniques. “With silkscreening, you pick up a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across so that the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each t.mes . It was all so simple – quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it” (Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: the Warhol ‘60s, New York 1980, p. 22). Indeed, most importantly was the ready capacity of the silkscreen mechanism to reproduce multiple images, and the six repetitions of the two spacemen in Astronauts immediately defines it as an archetypal Warhol. Whereas in the artist’s paintings, colors vary and their placement on the ground shifts, here, the essence of individuality in the silkscreen process is at its most elemental.

Astronauts presents with an exceptional, even lamina of silkscreen ink cast across the composition: its seamless dispersal evident through the equivalence of each repeated image, down to minute details of the specks in faraway stars. Methodological skill and technical mastery here result in the immediate and extremely vivid exposition of this galactic scene. As ever with Warhol’s oeuvre, import is inclined not only by subject, but also by method, process, and context. The thrilling, fantastical subject matter here is revealed through the patterned gradations of the printing process, and the inherent nature of this rendering is purposefully ambiguous. Walter Hopps succinctly describes that “Warhol took for granted the notion that the obvious deployment of traditional rendering not be revealed or employed, thereby expunging manual bravura from his work” (Walter Hopps in: Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil collects ion, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988, p. 7). Astronauts stands as a vast demonstration of Warhol’s earliest groundbreaking approach, a striking work of unparalleled historical significance.

Artist

Andy Warhol