$1,000 increase sends 10 girls to university for a year
Andy Warhol limited edition lithograph of Triple Elvis from 1963!
Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Triple Elvis
Year created: 1963
Medium: Premium Archival Matte Lithograph
Edition: Limited edition of 500
Height (inches): 13
Width (inches): 10
Depth (inches): 1
This piece is framed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Description of piece:
Triple Elvis (Ferus Type) is one of a 22-piece series of artworks that Warhol produced for his 1963 solo show at the Ferus Gallery – his second at the legendary Los Angeles art space and the follow-up to Warhol's pivotal 1962 exhibition in which his Campbell's Soup Can paintings made their debut. The artist took as his sole subjects a pair of reigning Hollywood icons: Elizabeth Taylor and Presley. Befitting two of the most marketable commodities of the early-'60s silver screen, Warhol used shimmering silver paint as the ground for both the Liz and Elvis series that appeared at Ferus. "It's the perfect alignment of artist and subject," Leslie Prouty, a senior specialist in Sotheby's Contemporary Art Department, says of Warhol's Ferus Elvis series.
"Back then, Elvis was 'The King,' and was this huge cultural phenomenon. And on the other hand Andy had certainly arrived in 1962 and was starting to change the world of fine art." One could read a work like Triple Elvis (Ferus Type) not only as an interrogation of celebrity and American mythology, but also as Warhol enacting a kind of confrontation with his own ascendant stardom, by his deliberately choosing to depict Presley in life size and in the role of pulp-Western gunslinger, pistol drawn. The repeated, silk-screened image – one well-inked, one ghostly faint – was appropriated from a publicity still taken on the set of Presley's 1960 film Flaming Star. This lithograph is not signed by Andy Warhol but comes with a Certificate of Authenticity verifying Warhol as the artist along with the limited edition of 500 from 1963.
Artist bio:
When he graduated from college with his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1949, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. It was also at this time that he dropped the "a" at the end of his last name to become Andy Warhol. He landed a job with Glamour magazine in September, and went on to become one of the most successful commercial artists of the 1950s. He won frequent awards for his uniquely whimsical style, using his own blotted line technique and rubber stamps to create his drawings. In the late 1950s, Warhol began devoting more attention to painting, and in 1961, he debuted the concept of "pop art"—paintings that focused on mass-produced commercial goods. In 1962, he exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell's soup cans.
These small canvas works of everyday consumer products created a major stir in the art world, bringing both Warhol and pop art into the national spotlight for the first time. British artist Richard Hamilton described pop art as "popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business." As Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again."
$1,000 increase sends 10 girls to university for a year