Andy Warhol

Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas
22 x 22 inches (55.9 x 55.9 cm)
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

But now it’s going to be flowers—they’re the fashion this year…They’re terrific!

—Andy Warhol

Created in 1978, Andy Warhol’s Flowers presents one of the Pop artist’s most renowned motifs. Measuring 22 inches square, this canvas represents the four blossoms in bright yellow, their chromatic brilliance emphasized by themonochromatic black-and-white patterning of grass that constitute the work’s ground. At once a symbol of natural beauty and resoundingly artificial in its highly graphic composition, Flowers is a vibrant and vivacious icon of its era.

To compose the image for his Flowers series, began in 1964, Warhol cropped, collaged, and rotated an image cut from that year’s June issue of Modern Photography, which accompanied an article explaining the effect of various exposure times and filter settings. Originally showing seven hibiscus blossoms, Warhol’s acetates contain four blossoms, their petals reduced to an outline surrounded by the negative space of the surrounding grass. The extremes of contrast between the original and final image was undoubtedly intentional on Warhol’s part, as he had a studio assistant run the source photograph through the Factory’s new Photostat machine to further flatten the image. Indeed, the Flowers series was among the most abstract body of work Warhol produced, marking a shift in his oeuvre away from the instantly recognizable imagery of brands and celebrities toward a focus on the unknown. This inversion is echoed in the process Warhol used to create the works: the flowers were painted first, then the background, and then the screen, effectively reversing the conventional order of figure and ground.