.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Descriptif du lot
Originally owned by the legendary collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, and subsequently a centrepiece of the prestigious Matthys-Colle Collection, 5 Deaths Twice II is an extraordinary work from one of Andy Warhol’s most powerful series. Executed in 1963, it is one of just two intact diptychs from his landmark cycle 5 Deaths, and the only example in which the images are stacked vertically. It is also the last remaining example with its original hinges still attached—a rare feature of Warhol’s practice. Based on a photograph of a horrific car accident, 5 Deaths formed part of his seminal Death and Disaster series. Encompassing some of the artist’s most iconic and unsettling images, these works tapped into the dark undercurrents of contemporary American life, probing themes of voyeurism, mass-media consumption and the inevitability of death. The car crash, in particular, was a subject that haunted Warhol, giving rise to masterpieces including Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) (1963) and Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963). Confronting the viewer with a dazzling infra-red glow, the present work represents a modern-day memento mori: a devotional altarpiece to life’s fleeting flame.
The work’s provenance is exceptional. Warhol worked on the painting during the summer of 1963, while he was completing his landmark portrait Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963). The Sculls were among the most significant contemporary art collectors of their day, and the portrait represented Warhol’s first ever commission: it is now owned jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The present work was originally intended for the artist’s landmark exhibition of Death and Disaster silkscreens at Galerie Ileanna Sonnabend in 1964—his first ever show in Paris. The Sculls, however, acquired it prior to the opening. Warhol had created two other hinged multi-panel versions of 5 Deaths for the show, but these were dismantled into single works by Sonnabend. The only other surviving diptych, 5 Deaths Twice I (1963), is also unhinged, thus making the present work unique. Among the few surviving hinged multi-panel works in his oeuvre, notably, is a triptych portrait of Ethel Scull.
In 1969, the work entered the Matthys-Colle Collection, acquired from the distinguished collection of the art dealer Serge de Bloe. Dr Roger Matthys, a noted Belgian neuropsychiatrist, and his wife Hilda Colle assembled what would become one of Europe’s most important and influential private collections, fuelled by a visionary passion for international contemporary art. The breadth and depth of their engagement with the art of their time was remarkable, and their collection encompassed pioneering examples of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop Art. In 1957, Matthys co-founded the Friends of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, whose acquisitions would later form the basis of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.). The organisation transformed the Belgian cultural scene, championing living artists at a time when their work was largely disregarded by local institutions and the public. The present work was included in two exhibitions at the institution between 2021 and 2022, marking its first public appearance for half a century. Matthys had previously loaned the work to Warhol’s landmark international retrospective between 1970 and 1971, which toured six museums including the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Begun in the summer of 1962, the Death and Disaster works represented a profound new direction for Warhol. Two months earlier, the curator Henry Geldzahler had encouraged him to dispense with his Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles in favour of more macabre muses. ‘Maybe everything isn’t always so fabulous in America’, he had suggested. ‘It’s time for some death’ (quoted in V. Bockris, The Life & Death of Andy Warhol, London, 1998, p. 169). Geldzahler gave him a copy of the day’s New York Mirror, dated 4 June 1962, which bore the headline ‘129 Die in Jet’. The newspaper clipping paved the way for a series that would irrevocably transform his practice. Warhol stopped using his own drawings as sources for his silkscreens, turning instead to pre-existing photographs. The move dramatically expanded both the technical and conceptual scope of his art. These works, wrote the critic David Bourdon, were to become ‘the greatest things he ever did’, holding a mirror up to society in a way that nothing else had done before (quoted in V. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, Cambridge MA, 1997, p. 161).
Among the earliest subjects in the series was Marilyn Monroe. Her suicide in August 1962 gave rise to a groundbreaking suite of portraits that confronted the entwinement of fame and tragedy. As the cycle evolved, however, Warhol began to shift his attention away from the trappings of celebrity. He became particularly fascinated by the way in which images of catastrophes circulated within the media, their horrors numbed by repetition. As Hannah Arendt’s report on the ‘Banality of Evil’ was being serialised in the New Yorker magazine—and at a time when commercial advertising sought to perpetuate the dream of ‘normal’ American middle-class life—the deaths of unsung civilians were being broadcast on a daily basis. ‘When you see an image over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect,’ he explained. He began to focus on images of ‘people who nobody had ever heard of,’ noting that ‘I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered’ (interviewed by G. Swenson, ‘What is Pop Art?’, in Art News, Vol. 62, November 1963, pp. 60-61).
From electric chairs to race riots, ambulance disasters and even a case of fatal food poisoning, the Death and Disaster series quickly gathered pace. The car crash, however, was a subject that preyed upon Warhol’s psyche more than any other. Throughout his life, the artist harbored an obsessive dread of accidental death, and readily admitted to a fear of drivers falling asleep at the wheel. He amassed a vast collection of newspaper photographs depicting car accidents, some culled from tabloid-style publications and others that were too shocking to have ever been printed. The specific source for 5 Deaths was one such image: a discarded 8 x 10 United Press International photograph which his studio assistant Gerald Malanga found in a bookstore on 7th Avenue and 23rd Street. The picture’s caption read, in part, ‘Two Die in Collision. Los Angeles, Calif.: Three Survivors of a car-truck collision, pinned beneath their overturned automobile, wait to be freed by rescue squads here, June 17th. Two other passengers in the car, both sailors from the USS Maddox at San Diego, were killed.’
Printed in high-contrast for easy dissemination and legibility, the image was readily adaptable to Warhol’s silkscreen process. The artist’s catalogue raisonné records a total of 16 works based on this photograph, with one held in the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin and two others held in the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Using a flat back silkscreen base, the image was screen-printed onto backgrounds painted in a single flat colour. Despite the mechanical nature of this method, however, the trace of the artist’s hand is still prevalent. As Malanga remembers, ‘[The car crashes] had a shock value that kind of excited him. Andy liked to think of it as mechanical, but it really was a hands-on approach, not an assembly line approach … they were always original, each painting; mistakes were inevitable and he accepted them for what they were: he called them “divine accidents”’ (‘Death and Disaster: Gerald Malanga Discusses Warhol’, Christie’s, 2007, online).
Throughout the Death and Disaster series, Warhol consistently teased out moments of irony. Here, the implications of the automobile—a vehicle of leisure and social mobility proudly attained by the middle class during America’s prosperous postwar years—are quite literally flipped on their head. The ultimate symbol of the American Dream becomes, instead, a machine of banal catastrophe, its promises subverted in the blink of an eye. Malanga recalls that ‘When we were making the 5 Deaths with the car upside down and the people underneath, Andy asked, “Are they still alive?” as if the accident had actually occurred in front of us’ (‘Photograph of a Painted Photograph: 5 Deaths’, in Andy Warhol 5 Deaths, exh. cat., Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2002, p. 29). The present work’s diptych format imbues the work with a sense of near-religious grandeur—a vivid memorial to the macabre irony of life’s ill-fated end. ‘The faces now nameless,’ writes Malanga. ‘The situation of the death and disaster receding in time and memory … A midsummer night on a lonely road to nowhere. The characteristics traits of what we have called modernity’ (ibid., p. 12).
The work’s provenance is exceptional. Warhol worked on the painting during the summer of 1963, while he was completing his landmark portrait Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963). The Sculls were among the most significant contemporary art collectors of their day, and the portrait represented Warhol’s first ever commission: it is now owned jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The present work was originally intended for the artist’s landmark exhibition of Death and Disaster silkscreens at Galerie Ileanna Sonnabend in 1964—his first ever show in Paris. The Sculls, however, acquired it prior to the opening. Warhol had created two other hinged multi-panel versions of 5 Deaths for the show, but these were dismantled into single works by Sonnabend. The only other surviving diptych, 5 Deaths Twice I (1963), is also unhinged, thus making the present work unique. Among the few surviving hinged multi-panel works in his oeuvre, notably, is a triptych portrait of Ethel Scull.
In 1969, the work entered the Matthys-Colle Collection, acquired from the distinguished collection of the art dealer Serge de Bloe. Dr Roger Matthys, a noted Belgian neuropsychiatrist, and his wife Hilda Colle assembled what would become one of Europe’s most important and influential private collections, fuelled by a visionary passion for international contemporary art. The breadth and depth of their engagement with the art of their time was remarkable, and their collection encompassed pioneering examples of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop Art. In 1957, Matthys co-founded the Friends of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, whose acquisitions would later form the basis of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.). The organisation transformed the Belgian cultural scene, championing living artists at a time when their work was largely disregarded by local institutions and the public. The present work was included in two exhibitions at the institution between 2021 and 2022, marking its first public appearance for half a century. Matthys had previously loaned the work to Warhol’s landmark international retrospective between 1970 and 1971, which toured six museums including the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Begun in the summer of 1962, the Death and Disaster works represented a profound new direction for Warhol. Two months earlier, the curator Henry Geldzahler had encouraged him to dispense with his Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles in favour of more macabre muses. ‘Maybe everything isn’t always so fabulous in America’, he had suggested. ‘It’s time for some death’ (quoted in V. Bockris, The Life & Death of Andy Warhol, London, 1998, p. 169). Geldzahler gave him a copy of the day’s New York Mirror, dated 4 June 1962, which bore the headline ‘129 Die in Jet’. The newspaper clipping paved the way for a series that would irrevocably transform his practice. Warhol stopped using his own drawings as sources for his silkscreens, turning instead to pre-existing photographs. The move dramatically expanded both the technical and conceptual scope of his art. These works, wrote the critic David Bourdon, were to become ‘the greatest things he ever did’, holding a mirror up to society in a way that nothing else had done before (quoted in V. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, Cambridge MA, 1997, p. 161).
Among the earliest subjects in the series was Marilyn Monroe. Her suicide in August 1962 gave rise to a groundbreaking suite of portraits that confronted the entwinement of fame and tragedy. As the cycle evolved, however, Warhol began to shift his attention away from the trappings of celebrity. He became particularly fascinated by the way in which images of catastrophes circulated within the media, their horrors numbed by repetition. As Hannah Arendt’s report on the ‘Banality of Evil’ was being serialised in the New Yorker magazine—and at a time when commercial advertising sought to perpetuate the dream of ‘normal’ American middle-class life—the deaths of unsung civilians were being broadcast on a daily basis. ‘When you see an image over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect,’ he explained. He began to focus on images of ‘people who nobody had ever heard of,’ noting that ‘I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered’ (interviewed by G. Swenson, ‘What is Pop Art?’, in Art News, Vol. 62, November 1963, pp. 60-61).
From electric chairs to race riots, ambulance disasters and even a case of fatal food poisoning, the Death and Disaster series quickly gathered pace. The car crash, however, was a subject that preyed upon Warhol’s psyche more than any other. Throughout his life, the artist harbored an obsessive dread of accidental death, and readily admitted to a fear of drivers falling asleep at the wheel. He amassed a vast collection of newspaper photographs depicting car accidents, some culled from tabloid-style publications and others that were too shocking to have ever been printed. The specific source for 5 Deaths was one such image: a discarded 8 x 10 United Press International photograph which his studio assistant Gerald Malanga found in a bookstore on 7th Avenue and 23rd Street. The picture’s caption read, in part, ‘Two Die in Collision. Los Angeles, Calif.: Three Survivors of a car-truck collision, pinned beneath their overturned automobile, wait to be freed by rescue squads here, June 17th. Two other passengers in the car, both sailors from the USS Maddox at San Diego, were killed.’
Printed in high-contrast for easy dissemination and legibility, the image was readily adaptable to Warhol’s silkscreen process. The artist’s catalogue raisonné records a total of 16 works based on this photograph, with one held in the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin and two others held in the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Using a flat back silkscreen base, the image was screen-printed onto backgrounds painted in a single flat colour. Despite the mechanical nature of this method, however, the trace of the artist’s hand is still prevalent. As Malanga remembers, ‘[The car crashes] had a shock value that kind of excited him. Andy liked to think of it as mechanical, but it really was a hands-on approach, not an assembly line approach … they were always original, each painting; mistakes were inevitable and he accepted them for what they were: he called them “divine accidents”’ (‘Death and Disaster: Gerald Malanga Discusses Warhol’, Christie’s, 2007, online).
Throughout the Death and Disaster series, Warhol consistently teased out moments of irony. Here, the implications of the automobile—a vehicle of leisure and social mobility proudly attained by the middle class during America’s prosperous postwar years—are quite literally flipped on their head. The ultimate symbol of the American Dream becomes, instead, a machine of banal catastrophe, its promises subverted in the blink of an eye. Malanga recalls that ‘When we were making the 5 Deaths with the car upside down and the people underneath, Andy asked, “Are they still alive?” as if the accident had actually occurred in front of us’ (‘Photograph of a Painted Photograph: 5 Deaths’, in Andy Warhol 5 Deaths, exh. cat., Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2002, p. 29). The present work’s diptych format imbues the work with a sense of near-religious grandeur—a vivid memorial to the macabre irony of life’s ill-fated end. ‘The faces now nameless,’ writes Malanga. ‘The situation of the death and disaster receding in time and memory … A midsummer night on a lonely road to nowhere. The characteristics traits of what we have called modernity’ (ibid., p. 12).