Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (JAMES DEAN), FROM "ADS," 1985 [F&S II. 355]
signed and numbered 181/190, there were also 30 artist's proofs; published by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., New York with inkstamp verso, printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York
sheet 38 ins x 38 ins; 96.5 cms x 96.5 cms
June 29, 2023
Estimate $100,000-$150,000
Realised: $168,750
Andy Warhol was an iconic American artist, director, producer and celebrity who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. He was famous for exploring popular culture in his work, using brands like Coca Cola and Campbell’s Soup.
His numerous contributions to popular culture include the phrase 15 minutes of Fame – derived from his quote “In the future, everyone will be world–famous for 15 minutes“, which appeared in the program for a 1968 exhibition of his work in Stockholm, Sweden.
Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$105 million for a 1963 canvas titled Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster); his works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
A 2009 article in The Economist described Warhol as the “bellwether of the art market”.
In 1985, Andy Warhol created a portfolio of ten works based on advertisements, known as the Ad Series. Produced only two years before Warhol’s death, the Ad Series was commissioned by Ronald Feldman of Feldman Fine Arts, who had worked with Warhol extensively throughout the 1980s. Warhol based these screenprints on well-known publicity images from the 1950s-1970s, choosing ones from Apple Computers, Mobilgas, Ronald Reagan for Van Heusen, Paramount, Judy Garland for Blackglama Furs, Chanel, Donald Duck for The New Spirit, Lifesavers, Volkswagen, and James Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause.”
“Rebel Without a Cause” was released in 1955, a coming-of-age drama about inter-generational conflicts centring around rootless suburban teenagers. The film starred Dean alongside Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood. “Rebel Without a Cause” was released only a month after Dean’s death in a car accident in September 1955, and cemented his status as a major film star.
As with the other images in this series, Warhol is using Dean to comment on the seductive and illusory nature of advertising, which he understood to be an influential form of visual culture in its own right. Warhol’s great talent lay in distilling and reflecting specific cultural moments, often through the lens of celebrity and consumerism. He also successfully blurs the lines between fine art and mass media, as well as fine art and commerce.
For Warhol’s screenprint of “Rebel Without a Cause,” he took inspiration not from the American release poster, but from the Japanese version, transforming it through his use of an electrified red, black and green palette. Unlike in the original, Dean’s figure is repeated twice, perhaps a comment on the endless reproduction of mass media, or on Dean and his celluloid afterlife.
Of the ten images in the Ad Series, it is this image which has been the most manipulated, the most stylized, and the one pulled from the most foreign source. The majority of Warhol’s work focuses on American imagery, and so his use of this Japanese version of an American classic can be viewed as a comment on the universality of mass-media and the global creep of an increasingly hegemonic visual culture.
By the time he made his Ad series, Warhol had been making movies for decades. He knew the seductive power and alchemy of film. Of the power of movie stars, he wrote in 1975: “That screen magnetism is something secret—if you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you’d have a really good product to sell.”
Looking at the screenprint of James Dean, it seems that by 1985, Warhol had figured it out, and had a really great product to sell.
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