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Andy Warhol
By Baker Jeff | April 12, 2008
Andy Warhol
Guns, 1981-1982
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
In the early 1980s Andy Warhol painted a variety of iconic objects, including guns, knives, and crosses. Warhol rejected the idea that his work functioned as social criticism and instead described himself as an American artist who was merely depicting his environment. This description suggests that his paintings of guns be read in the same way as his images of Campbell’s Soup, Marilyn Monroe, or Coca-Cola—as simply images of American icons. Yet, as with many of Warhol’s statements and works, there is the surface of things and then the multiple meanings below it. Gun ownership in America is hugely popular, in part, because it gives people a sense of security. Hollywood imagery and video games add to the allure of guns. The gun is also, through its widespread use and availability in America, a tool of real and commonplace violence. This particular gun, the .32 snub-nosed pistol, was of the type that Valerie Solanas used in her 1968 assassination attempt on Warhol. In his choice of such richly associative iconic objects, Warhol becomes a truly artful social observer.
Andy Warhol
Hammer & Sickle, 1976
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
72 x 86 x 1 1/4 in. (182.9 x 218.4 x 3.2 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Andy Warhol created his Hammer and Sickle series in 1976 after a trip to Italy where the most common graffiti in public spaces was this symbol found on Soviet flags. Under communist control it signified the union of industrial and farm workers’ interests. In Italy, a democratic country since the end of WWII, the repeated graffiti symbol was to Warhol more Pop than political. After returning to the United States, Warhol asked his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone to find source pictures of this symbol. The reproductions found in books were like the Soviet flag, flat in appearance, and Warhol wanted something different. Cutrone purchased a double-headed hammer and a sickle at a local hardware store and arranged and photographed the tools in many positions. Warhol used the Cutrone photographs for his silkscreened series.
In 1977, these works were exhibited under the ambiguous title Still Lifes at the Castelli Gallery in New York City. Warhol disavowed any political ties to his work, while he was simultaneously aware of the power of symbols and the cultural climate of the Cold War. This war between superpowers, America and the Soviet Union, from the early 1940s through the 1980s was characterized not by actual military combat but by a climate of tension and mutual perceptions of hostility between East and West, communism and capitalism, resulting in the build-up of arms, nuclear weapons, and influence peddling around the globe.
Knives ca. 1981 - 82
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
1998.1.267
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