Andy Warhol

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987).
"Sam Sam," ca.1950's.
Watercolor on lithographic paper.
Signed.
Appraisal report attached.
Measurements: 26.5 x 20 cm; 44.5 x 34.5 cm (frame).

Warhol, from an early age, demonstrated great artistic talent. Warhol's fascination with cats was partly inspired by his mother, Julia Warhola, with whom he lived in New York and who was also a cat lover. Together they came to have numerous pet cats, many of which were named "Sam." These drawings show an intimate side of Warhol, which would disappear in his later output. On the other hand, one guesses in them (cat drawings resolved in vibrant colors and playful sense) his early talent as a commercial illustrator that presages, on the other hand, the arrival of pop-art.

Considered the guru of modernity, Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year, already established in New York, he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases whose subject matter was based on some element or image from the everyday environment, advertising or comics. Soon he began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated from his works any expressionist trait until he reduced the work to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its maximum level of depersonalization in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as a working method, through which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor or Mao Tse-tung, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all of them works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. He is currently represented in the most important contemporary art museums in the world, such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Fukoka Museum in Japan, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the National Art Museum of the 21st century in Rome, the MUMOK in Vienna, the SMAK in Ghent and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the museums that bear his name in Pittsburgh and Medzilaborce (Slovakia).