ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987)."Lillian Carter, 1977.Graphite on paper.

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987).
"Lillian Carter, 1977.
Graphite on paper.
Signed on the back.
Provenance: Christie's: American Pastimes-Sports & Politics.
This work originates from the Estate of Andy Warhol, and from there, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Christie's will maintain a database of this work which will be used to corroborate provenance in the future to provide relevant information for the Andy Wahol Raissoné Catalogue.
Attached is a certificate of authenticity issued by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Measurements: 103.8 x 51.4 cm; 125 x 92 cm (frame).
Warhol was fascinated by the ambiguous border between politics and the concept of fame. As a result, he contributed his own interpretation of the subject by blending the two seemingly not so disparate worlds. He projected and inflected the idea of celebrity in his portraits, including those of politicians such as Lillian Carter's son, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States, as well as herself.
American visual artist who became the best known representative of Pop Art, an artistic trend in vogue during the 1950s and 1960s that was inspired by mass culture. The son of Slovak immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases with everyday, advertising and comic themes. He soon began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated any expressionist traits from his work until he reduced it to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its peak of depersonalisation in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as his working method, by means of which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Tse-tung, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. The use of mass-circulated images, easily recognisable to all kinds of audiences, such as the aforementioned soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles, became one of the most interesting and stable features of his entire output. On other occasions he crudely depicted real situations, such as accidents, street fights, funerals or suicides; within this theme, Electric chair is one of his most significant works. This appropriationism, a constant in the work of the supporters of Pop Art, extended to universal works of art by authors such as Raphael Sanzio, Giorgio de Chirico, Edvard Munch and Leonardo da Vinci. Through mass reproduction, he succeeded in stripping the media fetishes he used of their usual referents, turning them into stereotypical icons with a decorative meaning. In 1963 he set up the Factory, a workshop in which he brought together numerous figures from New York's underground culture. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life established a coherent line between his work and his life's trajectory; his peculiar appearance, androgynous and permanently topped with a characteristic blond fringe, ended up defining a new icon: the artist himself. He was one of the first artists to consciously exploit his image for self-promotional purposes; through a process of identification, he acquired in the eyes of the public the significance of just another advertising product. In 1963 he began a film career based on the same principles as his plastic work (such as visual reiteration), sometimes with a strong sexual and erotic content.