Andy Warhol silkscreened the Mona Lisa on canvas thirty times and casually titled it Thirty Are Better Than One; his ten-pack portfolio of Marilyn Monroe enjoyed wide circulation. Yet, over the course of his career he also developed a surprisingly contradictory strategy. Before producing his silkscreen editions, Warhol made numerous trial proofs, trying out different color combinations, making each of these prints unique. The special value of these prints, which are actually originals, has yet to be fully recognized and appreciated by the art market.
With this volume, Jörg Schellmann presents a catalog of Warhol's over one hundred trial proofs that were produced under the aegis of the Edition Schellmann from 1980 to 1986, illuminating the significance of these unique prints in the artist's print oeuvre.

 

Since 1969, Edition Schellmann has been publishing contemporary artworks in limited editions. Inspired by the visual culture revolution of the 1960s, Schellmann started producing prints and multiples with European and American artists, focussing on Joseph Beuys and his seminal idea of multiples. After ten years of publishing in partnership with Bernd Klüser (1975-1985), in the second half of the 1980s, Schellmann increasingly focussed on exploring and expanding the potential of producing editions. Recognizing that in our time art is no longer necessarily created by the artists hand but predominantly by conceptual design and production, it became evident that an edition could be any work of art produced in a certain number of copies. As a result of this approach, projects came into being that previously would not have been thought of as editions, i.e. objects composed of metal, wood, plastic, stone, concrete, light, paper, photography, video, etc. and combinations of these media, in dimensions no longer limited to those of traditional multiples. In the early 1990s, Edition Schellmann began a large series, still in progress, of site-specific Wall Works, installations on a wall for which the artists have created a design and parameters for how the work can be executed on a given wall at a given site. In reference to the serial concept of editions and Schellmann's 40th anniversary, this catalog is titled Forty Are Better Than One, alluding to the Andy Warhol painting, Thirty Are Better Than One, 1963, which depicts a series of thirty Mona Lisa reproductions – a tongue-in-cheek comment on the worshipped aura of unique works of art versus the mass-production and global distribution of images in our time.

Robert Longo's series The Freud Cycle draws into focus the Vienna apartment where Freud lived and worked, a scenery in which different historic and cultural layers are present in a merely mystical way: The interior of the Fin de Siècle, the place of birth and activity of the Vienna psychoanalysis, and the gloominess of the crimes of the Nazi period.

Wall Works marks the first time that the principle of the edition has been applied to the practice of wall installations. The artworks cannot be mounted on the wall according to the owners layout and taste, but rather they must be individuallyfine-tuned in accordance with the artist's specifications, to make a work in situ ensuring that each work unites with its environment in its own specific and non-interchangeable way. Consequently, as in the case of buildings, design and execution are not in the same hands, thereby – in two steps – creating a genuinely unique work of art.

The artist world-famous for his everyday images of consumer items, news, and celebrities astonishingly has created a considerable body of work using images of famous Western art works. Starting with his iconic image of Mona Lisa repeated 30 times he kept using art works as celebrities: Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Botticelli, Cranach, Raphael, Munch, de Chirico, Picasso and Matisse. Almost as an apotheosis, Warhol finalized his artistic oeuvre with extended series of Leonardo's Last Supper repeated on huge canvases in a wallpaper design fashion. John Cage pointed out succinctly: Warhol has shown through repetition that there is no repetition in art.

From 1958 to about 1965, Joseph Beuys worked on four sketchbooks collectively entitled Projekt Westmensch. Exhibiting veritably the whole range of his artistic vocabulary, the pages of these books are filled with drawings, texts, watercolors, lists of words and notions, concepts and themes with numerous notations for future projects. While many of the pages are related directly to his other work, there are some whole enigmatic forms, conceptual references and codes that will prove a fascinating challenge to viewers and professional art historians alike. The rhythm of the entries, often separated by long series of blank pages, provide a very intimate insight into the artists visual idiom and his universal thinking. (J.S.)

"Individual and collective sickness is taken as symptomatic of the profound alienation of the contemporary human condition, a kind of death, inflicted in turn by man on the entire natural universe. Metaphors of sickness and death, and therapy too. In February 1976, following his own serious illness, Beuys assembled his most tragic environment to date, 'show your wound'. The atmosphere was that of a mortuary. The theme was the experience of death. Assembembled at intervals around the edges of the space were objects in pairs, the doubling effect creating a sensation of illusion and shadow that challenged the physical reality of the objects." (Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, Thames and Hudson)