Flowers, 1964
Silk screen on canvas, 47 1/8 x 46 1/8 x 1 in. (119.7 x 117.2 x 2.5 cm)
Gift of The Woodward Foundation
1977.49.31
©2004 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Warhol's Flowers were originally produced in vast, unnumbered quantities and installed in large groups on the wall space of the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. There was no correct top or bottom to the images, and they could be randomly hung. The mass reproduction of the image through the silkscreen process reinforced the banality of the subject matter, perhaps even more bland than his commercial imagery such as Coca-Cola bottles and soup cans of the same period. Such repetition created the effect of wallpaper or decoration, a form of "low" art that stood in contrast to the elevated poetic vision and emotive gestural abstraction of Abstract Expressionist painting during the 1950s. Through distortion and flattening, and their placement on black background with magnified, abstracted blades of grass, Warhol's flowers are completely removed from nature.
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