Flowers, 1968
Wool and silk tapestry, 213 x 213 cm (83¾ x 83¾ in). Edition of 20, with artist’s name on front and © on verso.
This large-scale edition is part of Andy Warhol’s well-known Flowers series. The series marked a stark shift from Warhol’s previous work, the notorious Death and Disaster series, which included images like Birmingham Race Riot and Electric Chair. The idea for Flowers stemmed from a suggestion by Henry Geldzahler, then curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Geldzahler showed Warhol an issue of Modern Photography magazine, where he discovered a photograph of hibiscus flowers by Patricia Caulfield. Warhol created an abstract version of the image and shifted the flowers to create a square composition, thereby transforming the banal subject matter into a powerful pictorial concept.
