There are few things more aspirational in 2024 than hanging a signed Warhol on your wall. He instinctively understood the power of images and had an uncanny ability to select seemingly minor details from the blur of daily life that speak with great resonance once isolated. His audacious wit and far-sighted understanding of consumer culture and celebrity are as thrilling as ever.
His career as a printmaker was legendary and central to his identity as an artist. Warhol's prints crackle with glamour and hum with the static charge of 20th century New York.
In honour of his incredible achievement, we've assembled our Top 5 hand-signed prints for your delectation. Featuring champagne, two kinds of soup, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao, it's a heady cocktail of Warhol's greatest subjects.
As Warhol himself said, “the idea is not to live forever; it is to create something that will.”
"Old Fashioned Vegetable" from Campbell's Soup II, 1969
Warhol's most iconic non-human subject matter, the Soup Cans helped to cement his reputation and are still a knockout today. They were the subject of two portfolios of ten screenprints that he published in 1968 and 1969. Old Fashioned Vegetable comes from the second portfolio, in which Warhol explored some of the more unusual flavours offered by the Campbell's Soup Company.
He came to realise that he could achieve a more realistic mass-produced aesthetic by adopting the silkscreen process. He began by printing directly onto canvas and was soon exploring the possibility of creating multiples on paper. He believed that art should be for everybody and once said that the best thing about America was that the richest consumer bought essentially the same things as the poorest. By releasing his soup cans in different formats at different price points, his consumerist approach to making art assumed its logical conclusion.
"SCOTCH BROTH" FROM CAMPBELL'S SOUP II, 1969
Like Old Fashioned Vegetable, this piece is from Warhol's second Campbell's Soup portfolio. In 1968 the Campbell's Soup company decided that it needed to offer its customers a thicker, heartier, more 'masculine' line of soups. Scotch Broth was one of them, and Warhol - ever attuned to developments in advertising and branding - was sure to include the logo in his artwork the following year.
"MARILYN INVITATION (CASTELLI GRAPHICS)" (1981)
A fabulously bold image of Warhol's most iconic subject, published as the invitation to the exhibition Andy Warhol: A Print Retrospective 1963-81, held by the Leo Castelli Gallery. This hand-signed piece is a miniature reproduction of a work from the very first portfolio of prints made by Warhol's publishing business Factory Additions, set up in 1967. Most major American artists of the latter 20th century were represented by Castelli at one point or another, and he maintained a close working relationship with Warhol well into the 80s.
Two versions of this Invitation exist; one measures 17 x 17 cm and is folded like a greetings card, and the other is a single unfolded sheet measuring almost twice the size. Ours is the larger, unfolded format.
"Mao" (from the New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio) (1973)
Known for his fascination with fame, Warhol had begun using Mao's image in his work after the Chinese leader was referred to as the most famous person in the world in a Life magazine article from 1972.
This print's parent portfolio was created as a fundraising initiative to make it possible for the New York-based group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to donate a collection of American contemporary art to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Warhol's original drawing was photocopied. That copy was then photocopied, and so on, until 300 individual impressions had been made. Each one was distorted through enlargement and rotation, ensuring that the portrait soon became unrecognisable. Our print is number 32 in the sequence, so the image is still largely intact.
"COMMITTEE 2000" (1982)
An ultra-glamourous still life and a perfect emblem of Warhol's jet-setting lifestyle, this piece was created for the Committee 2000 in Munich, where funds were generated for arts-related initiatives that would be realized in advance of the new Millennium. In his diary, Warhol described the Committee as the “’2000’ people – it’s a club of twenty guys who got together and they’re going to buy two thousand bottles of Dom Pérignon which they will put in a sealed room until the year 2000 and then open it up and drink it and so the running joke is who will be around and who won’t.”
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