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Artist or Maker: Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

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Provenance: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner

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Exhibited: Wofsburg Kunstmuseum; Kunsthalle Wien; Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts; Bilbao, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Porto, Foundation de Sellalves, Andy Warhol: A Factory , September 1998-May 2000, no. 138 (illustrated).
Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Andy Warhol: Series and Singles , September-December 2000, pp. 92 and 196, no. 40 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: A star shown against a silver screen... Elvis 2 Times is one of the celebrated pictures of the "King" that Warhol executed in his Firehouse studio in 1963. It was only natural that, having portrayed Marilyn and Liz and even Troy Donahue, he should turn to Elvis as subject matter. While the others were movie stars, they lacked the immense and unprecedented star power that Elvis attracted during the crest of his early career in the mid-1950s. Wailing fans hounded him so much that he had to create Graceland as a secure refuge. For Warhol, who was fascinated by popular culture, fame and celebrity, what could be a more apt subject? Warhol himself stated that, "'Pop... Art'... is... use... of... the... popular... image" (A. Warhol in 1963, quoted in K. Goldsmith, ed., "Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet," I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962-1987 , New York, 2004, p. 23). There is little in the world that has been as enduringly popular as Elvis.

Intriguingly, unlike in the handful of earlier images of Elvis that Warhol had produced the previous year, in Elvis 2 Times Warhol selected a publicity image for a movie, Flaming Star , directed by Don Siegel. It is therefore all the more appropriate that Elvis is shown here against a silver background, a substitute for the silver screen. Warhol was a huge fan of cinema, and so it was only natural that he took his idols from movie screen to silkscreen. He was also a magpie-like collector of the popular culture ephemera, including screen shots and publicity stills of his favorite stars. These would often emerge as the sources for his pictures of stars. It must have been a thrill for him when, later in 1963, at a party that Dennis Hopper threw shortly after the opening of the exhibition of Elvis pictures at the Ferus Gallery in California, he found that he had become a celebrity in his own right, enough so that other guests included Hollywood actors, not least Troy Donahue himself. Meeting these figures was becoming increasingly attainable as Warhol's own notoriety, popularity and fame grew.

The importance of cinema to Warhol at this moment is reflected in the fact that it was during this period that he purchased his first movie camera, a Bolex device that took reels that lasted only a few minutes. This began his experimentation with movies, which would become one of his dominant interests. It was on this camera, despite its limitations (and with some improvisation -- looped footage) that Warhol created Sleep , an eight-hour movie of poet John Giorno in bed.

As well as recalling the silver of the cinema screen, the background of Elvis 2 Times gives the impression of opulence. The success of this aesthetic would be evidenced later in 1963 when the artist had to abandon his Firehouse studio, and set up the famous Factory, which he coated with silver paint and foil. The effect was a strange, almost-mirrored space that was glamorous and at the same time futuristic. It was like being inside a gleaming machine, a concept that particularly appealed to Warhol who himself often stated that he wished to be a machine. Wealth, clinical practicality, glamour, science fiction -- all these were referenced in the burnished walls of the Factory, and indeed in the background of Elvis 2 Times . This was also the look at the Ferus show, when the walls were filled top to bottom with vast edge-to-edge silver panels with the repeated image of Elvis everywhere.

In the silver of Elvis 2 Times there is splendor as well as glamour. There is a religious feel to the silver, recalling some of the altarpieces of the Russian Orthodox church, of Byzantine mosaics, and the Catholic Church of Warhol's own family roots and which had such a presence in the Pittsburgh of his youth. Here, Elvis is presented as the glistening new god for a more secular age, and Warhol has deliberately couched him in semi-religious trappings. Even the pistol levelled at the viewer could be a modern substitute for the lances, swords and spears of the Christian warrior saints.

By taking something from the universe of popular culture around him and presenting it in an almost religious context, smuggling what was considered "low" by dint of being popular into the venerable spaces of the art galleries of the United States, Warhol was enacting a process of democratization that was itself a microcosm of the American Way. The vulgar can become "high" art through the Warholian formula in the same way that Elvis, the son of a truck driver, occasional farmer, convicted petty thief -- can become one of the most recognised cultural figures of the twentieth century, and indeed of all history. Warhol celebrates the democratic, everyday origins of his modern saints, and he extends this to his view of the entire world:

"Everything is art. You go to a museum, and they say this is art and the little squares are hanging on the wall. But everything is art, and nothing is art. Because I think everything is beautiful -- if it's right" (A. Warhol, quoted in Newsweek , 7 December 1964).

Sometimes, "right" for Warhol could be a Brillo box or a dollar bill, sometimes an Old Master, and sometimes a film star. He perversely celebrates the endemic nature of so many "right" things in America by putting them on canvas, capturing them in a medium associated with a long historical tradition, with luxury, with skill, with beauty, with awe, and with religion. At the same time, there is something product-like about Elvis, indeed about celebrity, that Warhol clearly perceived. These Elvises are repeated in the same way as a stamp, a dollar bill or a soup. Even people appear manufactured in the modern age, and in the gleaming silver Elvis 2 Times , Warhol appears to celebrate this.

There is also a strong element of irony in this process, both at the cost of popular culture and our choices of new popular saints, and at the cost of the art world itself. In the early 1960s, the art world in the United States was still dominated by the Abstract Expressionists. Nothing could contrast more with their outpourings on canvas than the stencilled crispness of Warhol's silkscreens, emphasised in Elvis 2 Times by the brazen repetition of the image. And in terms of content, the idea of taking pop stars, actors, Campbell's Soup and enshrining them on canvas was clearly an affront not only to the death of figuration that had been trumpeted by critics such as Clement Greenberg, but also to the elitist concepts of the artists who had held reign over the avant-garde and the galleries for the past decade or so.

Warhol deliberately hid behind the mask of the idiot savant while other artists spilled themselves into their art. Even the silver of Elvis 2 Times reflects (literally) this imperturbable, inscrutable faade. The light of the viewer's world is hazily perceptible bouncing off the surface: nothing of Warhol can be perceived within. As he himself said, "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and film and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it" (A. Warhol, quoted in K. Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987: Commerce into Art , Cologne, 2000, p. 45).

At the core of Warhol's work is the notion that the choice an artist makes is the most important factor, not the facility with which it is rendered. Much can be seen of Warhol in all of his artistic choices, in his use of Elvis and other idols, in his process, and in the use of violence in so many of his celebrated works. While Marilyn's death prompted Warhol to portray her in his silkscreens, and Liz had been close to death, Elvis here appears lively in the extreme. And yet, there is nonetheless a jarring violence apparent in this gun-wielding figure. This is a strange twist on his later adage that, "Death can really make you look like a star" (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Celant, Andy Warhol: A Factory , exh. cat., Bilbao, 2000, n.p.). Also, it tallies with the fact that the first silver works that Warhol executed were not glamorous at all, but were Electric Chairs and Tunafish Disasters .

Aside from the early pictures of the singer of 1962 such as Red Elvis , the so-called Studio Type works were the earliest, pre-dating those that were later exhibited in the Ferus Gallery show. There are certain key differences in execution and composition. Regarding the former, the Studio pictures show -- as is spectrally evident in the present lot -- a rectangular base for the screened image, which adds a hazy tonality to the picture, seemingly tarnishing the silver-painted surface. This was itself often the result of hand painting, as opposed to the spray can technique that Warhol appears to have favoured in creating the Ferus pictures. Significantly, in the Studio works, Elvis is shown in his entirety, whereas in almost all the Ferus works, he is cropped at the top. The Elvis pictures were among the first that Warhol made with his new assistant, Gerard Malanga. The sheer scale of the pictures would have necessitated a studio assistant, as would Warhol's increasing penchant for distance between him and his artwork, allowing it to be Duchampian, almost a readymade, machine-like, impersonal and therefore all the more apt to the media-drenched, technological age in which he lived.

The Studio pictures gained their name because, following Warhol's death, they were found still on a roll in his studio. However, three works from this series had been stretched before this. Elvis 2 Times is one of only two that were stretched in the year of their execution, as is evidenced by their presence in the background of Duane Michals' photograph of the actress Jean Seberg, taken at Warhol's Firehouse studio that year for Glamour magazine (the third Studio picture stretched during Warhol's lifetime was done so only shortly before his death).

This edginess was a striking contrast to the Elvis who was emerging during this period following his time in the Army. After his discharge, Elvis released several tunes to great acclaim and chart success, and then embarked upon a film career. His manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, arranged a deal for seven motion pictures, of which Flaming Star was one. Elvis retired increasingly from live or even television performances of his songs, instead performing tracks for the soundtracks and releasing them as albums (it was dwindling sales of those soundtracks that would see him take to the stage again for the "1968 Comeback Special"). Less dancing, less live performing...and less notoriety or scandal. He was now heading towards a role as an entertainer for a wider public, no longer the hip-gyrating king of controversy. By the time Elvis 2 Times was executed, Elvis was fairly respectable, and the clean-cut image in the picture shows this. To highlight this, one need only look at the photographs from a couple of years later of the Velvet Underground, Warhol's protegés from 1965 and as far a cry as was possible from the smooth, homely, chiselled Elvis of the Flaming Star publicity stills.

Ever ambiguous, Warhol manages in Elvis 2 Times to present us with something that contains death and violence yet celebrates the singer of the silver screen of the Land of Opportunity. Is it mocking or fawning? As with so much of Warhol's work, this picture is a modern gleaming icon, a shimmering promise of wealth and of streets paved with gold, a mirage and a dream. It is a thrillingly opaque picture that today continues to confront, defy and engage its viewer. It is perhaps for this reason that Warhol's own Elvis series has become so iconic in its own right. The Elvis pictures from the series grace the walls of several museums -- and in the 1960s Bob Dylan even took one for himself.
25248791: Actress Jean Seberg in front of Elvis 2 Times at the Firehouse studio on East 87th Street, New York, 1963. Photo by Duane Michels.

25248807: Andy Warhol with an Elvis series at the Firehouse studio on East 87th Street, New York, 1963. c 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

25248869: Color postcard of Elvis Presley in the Western Flaming Star sent to Warhol from Paris by the poet, Charles Henri Ford, July 1963. c 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

25248821: Installation view of "Andy Warhol" at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, Fall 1963. c 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

24651202: Andy Warhol, Red Elvis , 1962. c 2007 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

24651189: Andy Warhol, Elvis I and II , (detail) 1963. c 2007 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

25248814: Ferus Gallery announcement. Archives Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.