Executed in a crisply registered palette of bright white flowers against a bold green background, the Flowers Painting embodies one of Pop Art’s most iconic bodies of work: Andy Warhol’s Flowers. In the half-century since its creation, Warhol’s Flowers have infiltrated popular culture as a touchstone of classic American Pop. During the summer of 1964, Warhol executed canvases portraying this exact composition in formats measuring twenty-four, forty-eight, and eighty-two inches square, intended for an exhibition with his new dealer Leo Castelli. At that inaugural exhibition, Warhol responded to the architecture of each gallery and installed the works in repetitive grids, creating an immersive environment of this signature motif, a display that was recently appropriated at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, where examples from the Flowers series – among others – were hung in a gallery wallpapered from floor to ceiling with similarly serial reproductions of the artist’s work. This dizzying and heady display echoed the initial environment in which these paintings were hung, at once anchoring them in the historical moment of their inception, but nevertheless proving the timeless appeal of this symbolic painting.
Photo credit: Andy Warhol silk-screening Flowers, 1965-7. Photo by © Stephen Shore.
