Andy Warhol

Estate of Andy Warhol
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
Gagosian Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2002

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984-1986, November 1992 - January 1993, p. 64, illustrated in color
London, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol B&W Ads and Illustrations 1985-86, February - March 2002

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges, particularly at the corners. Some light and stable craquelure is visible under close inspection on the right and left sides in the black silkscreened areas. There is a surface abrasion on the right side above the wheel and a few unobtrusive accretions throughout. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, scattered minor accretions fluoresce brightly, particularly a drip accretion at the bottom to the right of center, but there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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"I adore America. My image is a stat.mes nt of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash metallic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us." - Andy Warhol

Few artists have been able to capture and crystallize their surrounding culture and epoch into single works of art quite as masterfully as Warhol. The perspicacity and pithiness with which Warhol mined the core of American culture in particular is astounding and explains why he has come to be universally regarded as the eminent artist of the second half of the twentieth century. Warhol’s Mineola Motorcycle from 1986, possibly one of only two works in this size, was conceived as part of a series of black and white ad paintings in the 1980s for which Warhol appropriated imagery from advertisements, diagrams, maps, and illustrations in newspapers and magazines. With images of Russian missile bases, maps of Iran and Afghanistan, and common consumer items such as sneakers, hamburgers and motorbikes, they have a continuing uncanny resonance that coolly remarks on American consumer culture. Mineola Motorcycle, however, transcends this black and white ad paintings series; Warhol’s chosen image of the motorcycle, front and center on this larger than life canvas affronts the viewer with its projection of this hyper masculine symbol of Americana.

One of Warhol’s great gifts was his ability to identify certain universal tropes within American visual culture. One in particular that continues to persist even today is the ideal of the masculine American hero, a law unto himself, in the style of a cowboy or Marlon Brando in The Wild One. In Elvis, Warhol found his gun-toting cowboy and in Marlon he found his modern motorcycle riding Western anti-hero. Both of these figures represented the quintessential American rebel of the t.mes . As David Halberstam observes, "Elvis Presley was an American original, the rebel as mother's boy, alternately sweet and sullen, ready on demand to be either respectable or rebellious." (Exh. Cat., Boston, The Institute of Contemporary Art (and traveling), Elvis + Marilyn 2 x Immortal, 1994, p. 9). Brando's success in The Wild One was due to the fact that his character tapped into and captured a wider cultural phenomenon. The legendary American film critic Pauline Kael writes of Brando as representing “a reaction against the post-war mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early fifties had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap...Brando represented a contemporary version of the free American." (Pauline Kael, "Marlon Brando: An American Hero," The Atlantic, March 1966) His portrayal of Johnny Strabler in The Wild One became an iconic image, used both as a symbol of rebelliousness in his motorcycle jacket,  tilted cap, jeans and Ray-Ban sunglasses. This sense of swagger and machismo oozes from the figures depicted and Warhol imparts them with a gritty authenticity. 

This stereotype of the rebellious bad boy laid the groundwork for future films such as Easy Rider. Directed by and starring one of Warhol’s good friends, Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider completely revolutionized Hollywood and sent shockwaves through the entire movie studio world. Just as Elvis or Marlon set the template of how young people and especially young men at the t.mes saw themselves in the 60’s, Easy Rider did this for the late 70’s and 80’s man. One could say that the motorbike takes center stage in the film, almost a third protagonist of the movie, as the essential actor pushing against the boundaries that society imposed on the human characters played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. The motorcycle as an American image embodies notions of liberty and transgression that so influenced viewers of the film. It absolutely transformed the way that film studios thought about film and brought to light an entirely new demographic which they sought to please: teenagers. Before Easy Rider, films with big budgets were not made with an edge or aimed at younger generations. After Easy Rider studios began to push the envelope by making films that focused on such younger generations as the prime target. That Dennis Hopper starred and directed Easy Rider is important. Few people in the life of Andy Warhol had as transformative an impact as Dennis Hopper in terms of introducing Warhol to Hollywood and all of its glamour. Hopper played host to Andy Warhol during his first trip to Los Angeles in 1963 (occasioned by his second exhibition at Ferus Gallery), feting him with a party at his home. Warhol would later declare, “The Movie Star Party was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me… Everybody in Hollywood I’d ever wanted to meet was there, including Troy Donahue (who became the subject of his 1962 painting Troy Diptych), Peter Fonda (in Easy Rider).” (Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, Cambridge, 2010, p. 76).

It would come as no surprise if the use of the motorcycle motif in a painting such as the present lot was not in direct response to Dennis Hopper’s magnum opus Easy Rider. The raw and unadulterated shock that representations of such masculine iconography imparted on the viewer of such films and subsequently Warhol’s paintings was a potent one that pleased Warhol immensely. He returned to it to spectacular effect in Mineola Motorcycle. Warhol used the motif of the motorcycle throughout his career. Perhaps most famously in the aforementioned Marlon Brando series but also in one of his last paintings, Last Supper 1986, in which the same screen print as the present lot careens across the broad canvas filled with religious imagery. Warhol’s use of Marlon Brando on his bike in 1966 taps into the virile presence of the menacing biker and Warhol would take this notion to a new extreme when he created his own biker film, Bike Boy, the following year. The motorcycle is thus an enduring motif of great significance to Warhol.  It takes no stretch of the imagination to see the motorcycle as another representation of American masculinity and rebelliousness that Warhol identified for its potency and seductiveness to the younger generations. Mineola Motorcyle is painted in a direct and clear manner. The sharp contrast between black mark and white background transforms the painting of a motorcycle into a beacon of manhood and freedom.