To Andy Warhol, repetition reshapes spring itself—turning images into forms that no longer renew, but persist.
By Isabella Cao
What does it mean to encounter a season that no longer renews itself?
In Andy Warhol’s work, spring has not disappeared. It has simply stopped moving forward. His images do not unfold or develop over time. They return, repeat, and remain fixed, creating a visual world in which time no longer progresses.
This shift begins with something familiar. Spring, once understood as a cycle of growth and renewal, becomes in Warhol’s hands a condition of repetition. Images no longer emerge and fade. They return, reappear, circulate and persist.
Looking at Andy Warhol’s Flowers (1964) is to encounter a spring that refuses to grow. Four brightly colored blossoms hover against a dense field of black-and-white grass, their outlines are thick and graphic, their petals saturated with synthetic color. At first glance, they appear cheerful. But something is missing: there is no soil, no horizon, and no visible stem connecting them to the earth.
This logic doesn’t remain confined to nature. It extends across Warhol’s work, where flowers, faces, and even moments of catastrophe become subject to the same structure. In Marilyn Diptych, a face persits through repetition even as it fades. Grief circulates without resolving in the Jackie series. Shock flattens into rhythm across The Death and Disaster works. In all of these images, time does not unfold. It accumulates, repeats, and lingers.
To understand this suspended spring, we need to look beyond nature and toward the behavior of images. In Warhol’s work, images function like seasons—but without progression. They repeat, return, and remain unchanged.
What follows traces that condition across his work: from the mechanical reworking of nature in his floral works, to the stabilization of emotion in his celebrity portraits: from the rhythms of consumer life to symbols of renewal themselves—from Eggs to The Last Supper. That experience of time even echoes in his diaries, structured by the rhythmic, seasonless clock of his daily life.
From Spring to Autumn: Andy Warhol’s Flowers, Kiku, and Repetition in Pop Art
Warhol’s Flowers begin with an act of extraction. At the most literal level, a flower is something picked—removed from the ground, separated from its roots. But extraction also operates at the level of the image, isolating elements from the photograph in order to reauthor the image in his own style.
Flowers (1984)
Working from a photograph of hibiscus blossoms taken by Patricia Caufield and published in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography, Warhol selects and reconfigures the image to suit his purposes. He crops it aggressively, removing any sense of orientation, and transforms it into a reproducible silkscreen. When Caufield later discovered the use of her photograph, she filed a lawsuit in 1966, which the courts ultimately settled with Warhol paying damages and sharing royalties from the Flowers prints.
But the process was not simple appropriation. By removing the stems and collapsing the relationship between foreground and background, Warhol eliminated the spatial distance that originally separated the flowers from the grass. In the source photograph, the blossoms sit in the foreground while the grass recedes behind them. In Warhol’s version, that depth disappears. He flattens both elements onto the same surface, giving the image its recognizable graphic immediacy.
The flowers undergo a similar transformation: Warhol strips their natural variation and organic details away, and replaces them with thick outlines and synthetic color. What remains is no longer a photographic representation of a living plant, but an image designed for repetition. The flowers can circulate, return and persist as a Warhol-authored icon.
This shift from nature to reproduction invites a broader question. What is lost? And What is gained when an image is repeated.
In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin argued that mass production diminishes the aura of an artwork—its unique, authentic presence in time and space. Warhol’s Flowers suggest something different. Here, aura does not disappear; it relocates. It no longer resides in the flower’s biological uniqueness as a natural object, but in the persistence of the image itself as it circulates through repetition.
The shift becomes clearer when we place Warhol’s Flowers alongside his later Kiku series.
Kiku (1983)
In the Western artistic tradition, spring signals renewal—a cyclical rebirth where life emerges from decay. However, in Warhol’s visual world, images rarely move forward or develop. Instead, they return, repeat, and persist within his visual vocabulary.
In Japanese culture, the chrysanthemum (kiku) symbolizes autumn, longevity, and well-being. This creates a productive tension within Warhol’s floral imagery. While his earlier Flowers draw upon a Western visual language of spring, the later Kiku series reflects imagery traditionally associated with autumn. This imagery also echoes traditional Edo-period chrysanthemum prints, where the flower appears as a stylized, flattened motif—an approach that resonates with Warhol’s own graphic treatment in the Kiku series.
Yet Warhol renders both through a similar visual logic: flattened forms, traced outlines, and fields of synthetic color. The seasonal distinction begins to collapse.
Spring is traditionally associated with emergence, youth, and growth. Autumn, by contrast, signals maturity, decline, and the slow winding down of that cycle. But Warhol does not allow these images to unfold within that cycle. Instead, he holds them in place.
There is also a temporal echo between the works themselves. Flowers precedes Warhol’s near-fatal shooting in 1968, while the Kiku series of 1983 emerges in the final years of his life. In this way, we can read the shift from spring to autumn can be read biographically, since Warhol’s body never quite recovered from that shooting.
It carries a sense of reflection, completion, the passage of time, and maybe subconsciously echoing Warhol’s own life.
Read in this way, the contrast between the two works may suggest a shift from the optimism of spring and youth toward a more reflective engagement with maturity, decline, and the closing of the cycle.
But what remains is not a cycle. It’s a system. Seasonal meaning persists as reference, but not as experience. Spring and autumn no longer describe time’s passing. They simply describe how images behave: returning, repeating, and persisting in Warhol’s visual world.
Seasons, particularly spring, become a static aesthetic condition rather than a cyclical biological process. Warhol extends this same logic to human subjects, treating them as images that return, repeat, and remain fixed rather than evolving over time. Human subjects, like flowers, become subject to repetition.
Repetition and Emotion in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn and Jackie Series
The shift from natural subjects to human figures introduces a new and compelling dimension to Warhol’s work: emotion. By repeating a face dozens of times across a grid, Warhol softens the singular drama of the individual and stabilizes emotion into something that can be held, circulated, and sustained.
Marilyn Diptych (1962)
In the Marilyn Diptych (1962), brightness and fading coexist across the canvas like a condensed cycle of seasons. The vivid, saturated images on the left suggest the vitality of spring, while the fading, ghostlike repetitions on the right move toward autumn and winter, where the image begins to dissolve.
The viewer encounters two large panels—one vivid and immediate, the other receding and unstable. Intimacy gives way to distance. We are no longer looking at a person; but at the persistence of her image. Repetition removes Marilyn from the specificity of time, allowing her likeness to endure as a stable, circulating presence. Emotion is not resolved: it is held in place.
Even as the image moves toward its faded “winter,” it never completely disappears. The cycle remains incomplete. Through repetition, Marilyn is continually renewed, suspended between presence and absence. Her image persists not despite repetition, but because of it—a perpetual spring produced by the image itself.
Even now, Marilyn’s likeness remains one of the most recognizable forms within both Warhol’s visual language and contemporary culture. It is sustained through the very repetition that first transformed her into an icon.
If Marilyn embodies the persistence of fame through repetition, the Jacqueline Kennedy (Jackie) series applies this same structure to emotion—specifically, to the public circulation of grief.
Jacqueline Kennedy (Jackie) (1963)
Produced in 1963 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, The Jackie series draws from press photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy in the days surrounding the event. In works such as Nine Jackies, Warhol repeats her image across multiple panels, alternating between moments of composure and the expression of mourning.
Jackie herself existed as a highly controlled public image. Warhol often turned to press photographs from publications like Life magazine, where widely circulated images of figures such as Jacqueline Kennedy became source material for his silkscreen portraits.
In the Andy Warhol Diaries, on Wednesday, November 9, 1977, he recalls being told at a a party: “I know you have a camera, and you can take pictures of everyone here except Mrs. Onassis.” He later observed that “there were 4,000 photographers taking pictures of Jackie. And that horrible girl had come over to tell me I couldn’t!”
This interaction highlights the strange tension between her constant visibility and the strict control over her image. This tension is built directly into the structure of the work. Jackie’s image circulates widely, yet remains fixed, distant, composed, and contained.
This dynamic extends beyond individual figures and into Warhol’s broader treatment of imagery, where repetition does not intensify emotion, but gradually diminishes its impact.
Repetition and Shock in Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster Series
Warhol famously observed that repeated exposure to shocking imagery reduces emotional impact. This idea becomes central to his Death and Disaster series, where repetition does not intensify shock, but drains it. As Warhol remarked, “If you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away.”
Through the silkscreen process, Warhol repeats traumatic images—car crashes, suicides, the electric chair—until their original emotional weight begins to dissolve. What once registered as a singular moment of violence becomes something closer to an empty, circulating form. The tragic image is present, but no longer immediate. Warhol’s work does not erase the shock, but stabilizes it and holds it in place through repetition.
This effect is embedded in the structure of the works themselves. In the Electric Chair series, Warhol incorporates the word “silence” directly into the image, reinforcing a sense of stillness. In works such as the Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times , Warhol amplifies this stillness through the use of a diptych format, where the he repeats the image fourteen times and pairs it with a blank, monochrome panel. The empty space functions as a visual pause or a moment of rest. A surface that offers no narrative or resolution, allowing the viewer to confront both presence and absence at once.
Warhol’s Race Riot images extend this logic into scenes of collective violence. Based on press photographs from the Birmingham protests of 1963, the work depicts police officers confronting Black demonstrators, with attack dogs lunging forward, teeth bared. In the repeated image, the dog’s movement never resolves. It is forever caught in the moment before impact, its aggression suspended. The scene does not progress, and it does not conclude. Instead, it persists as an image of violence held in place, circulating without release.
Time, in these works, does not move forward. It lingers. The repeated image prevents the event from fully passing, while the absence of progression prevents it from fully resolving. What remains is a flattened surface where emotion is no longer unfolding, but stabilized. In this sense, Warhol strips violence of its temporal arc: there is no aftermath, no renewal, only repetition. The work holds what might once have belonged to a cycle of rupture and recovery in a continuous, suspended state—a spring without renewal.
This suspension of time does not remain confined to catastrophe. In Warhol’s broader practice, it expands into the structure of everyday life. Repetition is no longer tied to shock or emotion, but defines how time itself is experienced.
Andy Warhol and Consumer Time: Repetition in Mass Production and Culture
In nature, spring promises rebirth and renewal—a cycle of growth and change. In consumer culture, it offers something quite different: not transformation, but return. Nothing develops. Things simply reappear, again and again and again.
Campbell’s Soup Cans and Warhol’s Logic of Repetition
In Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), Warhol presents a visual field structured by circulation and serialization. Each canvas depicts the same object with only minimal variation, echoing the standardized logic of mass production. The soup can bought today is identical to the one bought yesterday. There is no progression in this system, only continuity.
Warhol embraced this condition directly. He rejected the idea of a singular, original work, and adopted mechanical reproduction as both method and subject. His process reflects a world in which consumer objects do not evolve, but circulate as identical forms. Whether depicting a soup can, a Coca-Cola bottle, or a celebrity, Warhol treats each as part of the same visual vocabulary—flattened, repeatable, and endlessly reproducible.
In a 1964 interview with Newsweek, he recognized this as a defining feature of modern American life, noting that, “Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way.” In this sense, consumer culture replaces the organic rhythms of growth with a manufactured present that continuously returns to itself.
Andy Warhol’s Eggs: Repetition Between Consumption and Renewal
In the final decade of his life, Warhol returned increasingly to forms. Among them, his Eggs of 1982. Set against dark or muted grounds, these softly rendered ovoid shapes recall one of the oldest symbols of spring.
If Warhol’s Soup Cans and depictions of consumer products present repetition as a condition of modern life, his Eggs introduce a more ambiguous form; one that sits between commodity and symbol.
Produced in the early 1980’s, Warhol’s lesser-known Eggs appear in Polaroids and paintings. In the Polaroids, Warhol often arranged them beside or within their cartons. The pairing is direct and deliberate: the egg as a natural form, the carton as an industrial container. Taken together, they collapse the distinction between organic life and consumer packaging. What might have once signaled origin as something laid, gathered, and perishable, now appears as part of a standardized system, counted in dozens, arranged, and circulated.
The egg carries another meaning that cannot be fully absorbed into consumer time. Across cultures, this simple form remains one of the most enduring symbols of spring, traditionally associated with renewal, birth, and cyclical time. In the context of Easter, it becomes even more specific: a sign of resurrection, of life emerging after death.
Yet here, too, the logic shifts. The eggs do not hatch. They do not transform. Like his flowers, Warhol removes them from any temporal process and presents them as images: repeated, arranged, and held in place. Even in their soft coloration and pared-down form, they remain suspended between states: not fully natural, not fully symbolic, not fully consumed.
Placed between the logic of mass production and the language of ritual, Eggs clarify something essential in Warhol’s work. They show how even the most persistent symbols of renewal can be drawn into a system where time no longer unfolds, but returns.
Andy Warhol’s Last Supper: Repetition, Ritual, the Question of Renewal
If spring traditionally culminates in its renewal, its most powerful symbolic form appears in the Christian narrative of death and rebirth. The story of Christ—crucifixion followed by resurrection—offers one of the clearest cultural expressions of religious time. It is loss, transformation and return.
Warhol’s Last Supper series, produced between 1984 and 1986 and exhibited in Milan in 1987, takes this structure as its point of departure. Commissioned to respond to Leonardo da Vinci’s mural, Warhol did not work from the original painting, but from reproductions. The image arrived to him already mediated, already flattened; consistent with the logic that runs through his work.
What follows is not a singular interpretation, but an accumulation. Across nearly one hundred variations, Warhol repeats the image of Christ and the apostles in shifting scales, formats and color schemes. In works such as Sixty Last Suppers, Warhol multiplies the scene until it begins to lose its narrative clarity. The image no longer unfolds as a story, but as a structure.
This repetition produces a subtle but significant shift, which seems to consolidate what we’ve seen earlier works that employed this method. The original image, tied to a narrative of sacrifice and renewal, is held in suspension. Warhol repeats the moment before betrayal again and again, but never resolves it. Resurrection is implied, but never depicted. The cycle remains incomplete.
And there is something poignant in this, especially as we contemplate the work as one of Warhol’s final offerings. Warhol, a lifelong Catholic who attended church regularly, returns to an image saturated with ritual, belief, and the promise of renewal. Yet his treatment does not affirm that promise. Instead, it subjects the religious image to the same logic found throughout his work: repetition without progression, presence without resolution.
Seen in this light, The Last Supper does not negate renewal, but withholds it. The image persists, but its temporal arc is suspended. Like the flowers that do not grow, the faces that do not change, and the events that do not pass, the sacred narrative is held in place. Spring remains, but renewal does not arrive.
The End of Renewal: Repetition and Time in Warhol’s Work
What emerges is a world in which both images and experiences are stabilized through repetition. Just as the flower no longer grows and the face no longer changes, the object no longer evolves. This is the quiet consistency of his work: Warhol draws nature, emotion, consumption and even belief into the same system. Images persist, but they do not progress. Each remains available, identical, and present—circulating within a system where renewal has been replaced by return.
Warhol’s personal life reflected this same temporal structure. His diaries do not unfold as a narrative of transformation, but as a steady accumulation of repeated experiences—phone calls, dinners, social encounters, and observations recorded day after day.
In his diary entry for Wednesday, August 2, 1978, he captures this condition directly:
“Life really does repeat itself. The old songs come back in a new way and the kids think they’re new and the old people remember and it’s a way of keeping people together, I guess, a way of living.”
Here, Warhol does not frame repetition as a lack of progression, but as a defining structure of modern life. The new never arrives fully formed; it reappears in altered form, already familiar. Time does not advance through seasons of renewal, but loops endlessly.
Warhol returned to this experience directly in 1980, while revisiting his Flowers. Painting the same subject under nearly identical conditions, he felt what he described as a kind of temporal collapse:
“I was doing Flower paintings again and it was so sweltering and I got a funny feeling, like a flashback to 1964 because it was the same Flowers and the same heat and the same mood as when I first made them that summer.”
The image had not changed. The conditions had not changed. Time had folded back onto itself.
What Warhol reveals, ultimately, is not the disappearance of time, but its reorganization. Seasons remain, but they no longer unfold. Spring is still present, but it has been stripped of its forward momentum. What replaces it is something else: a continuous present, structured by repetition—a world of visual persistence.