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Descriptif du lot
Executed between 1979 and 1980, Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) is a mesmerising iteration of one of Andy Warhol’s most celebrated subjects. The Mona Lisa, immortalised by Leonardo da Vinci, had first entered his pantheon in 1963, following her legendary visit to the United States. Taking her place alongside Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and other American icons, she had propelled Warhol’s own dizzying rise to fame during this period. By 1978, the artist had accrued his own mythology, and began to cast a retrospective eye over his own practice. The present work forms part of his Reversals series, in which he reprised some of his most beloved images using screens developed from photographic negatives. With its gestural painterly backdrop, created using a sponge mop, its luminous, ghostly white-on-white palette seems to echo Warhol’s own ideas about self-effacement and the ephemerality of images. The Mona Lisa—a painting as enigmatic as the artist himself—quivers on the brink of total abstraction.
In 1963, the Mona Lisa’s American debut had caused a media sensation. On loan from the Musée du Louvre in Paris, she arrived at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery to an audience of nearly two thousand people, who waited in the cold to witness her unveiling. Photographers paralleled her celebrated smile with that of Jacqueline Kennedy, who had arranged the painting’s American tour in collaboration with the French Minister of Culture, and who would later become a Warholian muse herself. A month later the painting was transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There, it was visited by more than one million people—including Warhol—who queued for hours along Fifth Avenue. Reproduced and circulated through the currents of mass media, the Mona Lisa had entered the ranks of contemporary American iconography, as ubiquitous as Coca Cola and as alluring as a silver-screen star. Warhol, already deeply immersed in questions of celebrity and image, lost no time in seizing the work as a subject. The results, based on three different images of the painting in the Met’s exhibition pamphlet, catapulted his own reputation to new heights.
Warhol’s Mona Lisa silkscreens marked his first major painterly engagement with the art-historical canon. His choice of work was not without precedent. Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich and René Magritte had all riffed upon Leonardo’s masterwork. Marcel Duchamp, in the provocatively-titled L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), had adorned a copy of the image with a moustache and goatee. Others, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy, would follow in Warhol’s wake. As the most widely reproduced painting in the world, and with a history that included tales of vandalism, theft and wartime concealment, the Mona Lisa’s weighty mythology lent itself perfectly to postmodern interrogations. Warhol, moreover, was captivated by the legend of Leonardo himself: an artist who not only produced some of the most enduring images of his time but who also wielded powerful influence among the great and the good of Renaissance society. It was a status to which Warhol himself inspired, and one which—by the late 1970s—he had arguably achieved.
It was during this period that Warhol began to look back over his practice, reprising and reinventing some of his own personal highlights. At the forefront of this new body of work was the Mona Lisa. She featured in his series of Retrospectives—which remixed multiple past subjects within single canvases—as well as in a separate group of 19 works produced during the summer of 1978. Shortly afterwards, he began the Reversals, revisiting six key subjects including Marilyn Monroe, Chairman Mao and his own self-portrait. Warhol made 12 Mona Lisas as part of this cycle: the present work is one of just four to feature two iterations of the image in white-on-white. The sponge mop, which he had begun using in 1976, imbued these creations with a new sense of painterly bravura and abstraction, echoing the Shadows produced during this period. The shimmering all-white palette, meanwhile, seemed to invoke the works of Robert Ryman and Jasper Johns, the image dissolving into spectral obscurity.
Warhol would continue to engage with the work of the Old Masters over the following years. In 1984 he produced the series Details of Renaissance Paintings, which confronted works by Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, as well as Leonardo’s The Annunciation (circa 1472). His obsession with the latter’s work would culminate in what was to become the grand finale to his practice: a major two-year project based on The Last Supper (circa 1495–1498), which comprised more than a hundred paintings, silkscreens, prints and works on paper completed shortly before his death. The bust of Leonardo presided over Warhol’s Factory during these years, his spirit channelled through an artist whose works left a similarly indelible mark upon the world. Here, Warhol reflects on an image that never left his own psyche: for all its pallor, it remains, unmistakably, the Mona Lisa.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.
In 1963, the Mona Lisa’s American debut had caused a media sensation. On loan from the Musée du Louvre in Paris, she arrived at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery to an audience of nearly two thousand people, who waited in the cold to witness her unveiling. Photographers paralleled her celebrated smile with that of Jacqueline Kennedy, who had arranged the painting’s American tour in collaboration with the French Minister of Culture, and who would later become a Warholian muse herself. A month later the painting was transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There, it was visited by more than one million people—including Warhol—who queued for hours along Fifth Avenue. Reproduced and circulated through the currents of mass media, the Mona Lisa had entered the ranks of contemporary American iconography, as ubiquitous as Coca Cola and as alluring as a silver-screen star. Warhol, already deeply immersed in questions of celebrity and image, lost no time in seizing the work as a subject. The results, based on three different images of the painting in the Met’s exhibition pamphlet, catapulted his own reputation to new heights.
Warhol’s Mona Lisa silkscreens marked his first major painterly engagement with the art-historical canon. His choice of work was not without precedent. Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich and René Magritte had all riffed upon Leonardo’s masterwork. Marcel Duchamp, in the provocatively-titled L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), had adorned a copy of the image with a moustache and goatee. Others, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy, would follow in Warhol’s wake. As the most widely reproduced painting in the world, and with a history that included tales of vandalism, theft and wartime concealment, the Mona Lisa’s weighty mythology lent itself perfectly to postmodern interrogations. Warhol, moreover, was captivated by the legend of Leonardo himself: an artist who not only produced some of the most enduring images of his time but who also wielded powerful influence among the great and the good of Renaissance society. It was a status to which Warhol himself inspired, and one which—by the late 1970s—he had arguably achieved.
It was during this period that Warhol began to look back over his practice, reprising and reinventing some of his own personal highlights. At the forefront of this new body of work was the Mona Lisa. She featured in his series of Retrospectives—which remixed multiple past subjects within single canvases—as well as in a separate group of 19 works produced during the summer of 1978. Shortly afterwards, he began the Reversals, revisiting six key subjects including Marilyn Monroe, Chairman Mao and his own self-portrait. Warhol made 12 Mona Lisas as part of this cycle: the present work is one of just four to feature two iterations of the image in white-on-white. The sponge mop, which he had begun using in 1976, imbued these creations with a new sense of painterly bravura and abstraction, echoing the Shadows produced during this period. The shimmering all-white palette, meanwhile, seemed to invoke the works of Robert Ryman and Jasper Johns, the image dissolving into spectral obscurity.
Warhol would continue to engage with the work of the Old Masters over the following years. In 1984 he produced the series Details of Renaissance Paintings, which confronted works by Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, as well as Leonardo’s The Annunciation (circa 1472). His obsession with the latter’s work would culminate in what was to become the grand finale to his practice: a major two-year project based on The Last Supper (circa 1495–1498), which comprised more than a hundred paintings, silkscreens, prints and works on paper completed shortly before his death. The bust of Leonardo presided over Warhol’s Factory during these years, his spirit channelled through an artist whose works left a similarly indelible mark upon the world. Here, Warhol reflects on an image that never left his own psyche: for all its pallor, it remains, unmistakably, the Mona Lisa.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.