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Superman by Andy Warhol

April 29, 2002: Andy Warhol's Superman Auction

Sotherby's are auctioning off a Superman painting by Andy Warhol. Lot 34 (of a 61 lot auction), the 1981 painting has a price estimate of US$1,000,000-1,500,000 and will go under the hammer at 7pm on May 15th in New York.

Some controversy surrounds this painting and its origins/ownership. However here is how the item is described by the Sotherby's website...

Signed and dated 1981 on the overlap; stamped and numbered A127.011 by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. on the overlap acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas

Provenance: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., New York Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1988

Exhibited: New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Andy Warhol Myths, September - October 1981 Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Andy Warhol: Bilder 1961 bis 1981, October - December 1981, cat. no. 62, illustrated in color Seoul, Ho-Am Art Hall, Contemporary Art from New York, July - August 1988 New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Myths, January - February 2000

The subject of Andy Warhol's 1981 painting, Superman, hardly needs to be introduced or deciphered. As with many, if not all of Warhol's pop-icons, the image of Superman makes its own immediate statement complete with a panoply of instantaneous associations and meanings. Superman, the icon, inhabits the very same ``tradable consciousness of the world of things'' from which Warhol drew much of his pop-culture iconography (Heiner Bastian, Andy Warhol Retrospective, London, 2001, p. 28). A world-wide symbol of all that is honorable and true, this vibrating image of every child's hero is perhaps as meaningful now as it was almost seventy years ago for the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who read the original daily comic strips from which this image was taken.

Superman (1981) was not Warhol's first encounter with the world famous `Man of Steel'. In 1960, Andy Warhol produced his first hand-painted pictures based on comic-strip figures, including Batman, Dick Tracy, Popeye, and Superman. Warhol's 1960 Superman is an exact and purposeful replica of a segment of the original comic strip, the intended Pop-art focus being on the ready-made nature of the artist's blatantly appropriated subject matter. This particular image was used in postage-stamp form as a logo for the Superman comic-strips and books published by DC Comics.

A part of the artist's 1980s Myths series, this image of Superman exemplifies the modern day version of popular mythology, and more specifically the myth of the superhero. After what Warhol considered to have been the rather lackluster decade of the seventies, the artist began to take a fascinating retrospective look at his own career. The artist's Myths series was a direct result of this retrospective attitude as the artist took renewed inspiration from ten fictional characters, more specifically, American icons with mass-cultural appeal. First exhibited at Ronald Feldman's gallery space in New York, this series represents the culmination of Warhol's interest in America's obsession with the myth of fame and glamour.

Read the complete description at the Sotherby's Auction website.


2002 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News

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