Lot 117 D

"Warhol painted fifteen versions of Munch's printed motifs onto canvas, and he produced upwards of a thirty trial proofs of graphic versions […] The printed versions are vibrant with Day-Glo colors and improbably amplified details. In color, facture, stylization, and scale, they are signature "Warhols," the products of a long-recognized stylistic and technical branding. Yet more than any of Warhol's other art-historical adaptions, these works remain resolutely "Munchs," images that had been iconized over the course of a century. They are among Warhol's few appropriations of old masters that leave the overall compositions intact rather than fragmentary, as occurs in his Botticelli, Leonardo, or Raphael paraphrases. In their oscillation, Warhol's After Munch series suggests more points of convergence in the artist's approaches to print media and career building than one may at first suspect. Both artists mined the possibilities of an original copy, or a copied original, explored how an image could be multiplied and transformed through studied repetition, and promoted the circulation of their reproduced images in the marketplace. Warhol, moreover, did not merely appropriate Munch's motifs, but in reproducing them, he cannily scrutinized and in some cases decoded their compositional strategies and in that way, strangely, found affinity with the experimental and exploratory Munch." (Patricia G.Berman, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction, Warhol, Munch and the Multiplied, in: Munch Warhol and the Multiple Image, exhib.cat. The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York 2013, p.11/12)