Lot 11 D

With his four-part series of colour screenprints titled “Beethoven”, Andy Warhol pays tribute to one of the most important personalities in music history: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Created in 1987, the year of the artist's death, it is one of Warhol’s last major bodies of work. Presented here in its entirety, the series is based on Joseph Karl Stielers' famous portrait of Beethoven from 1820, which shows the composer in a moment of utmost concentration—with a determined gaze and brilliantly dishevelled hair, immersed in his work on the “Missa solemnis.”
Warhol highlights pictorial elements of the composer such as the face, hands and neckerchief with coloured areas in four different combinations, which stand out in stark contrast to the dark background and the dressing gown. The composition is structured by clearly defined contour lines. In contrast to earlier portraits, Warhol works here with a collage-like layering, combining the portrait of Beethoven with an excerpt from the handwritten score of the Piano Sonata No. 14, the so-called “Moonlight Sonata,” which lies over the image, framing the composer's face and hands.
The ”Beethoven” portfolio was created on the 160th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, commissioned by the Bonn gallerist Hermann Wünsche (1941-1993) - one of Warhol’s earliest proponents in Germany - and stands alongside the artist’s portraits of historical figures such as “Goethe” or “Friedrich The Great”, for which he drew on art-historical motifs.
“By integrating Beethoven in the work of the American star-artist [...] the composer stands in line with the superstars of the 20th century media art world. Warhol’s idea that artistic engagement should extend beyond the world of galleries and museums, and penetrate a modern culture dominated by mass media, is applied here to a composer of the past, who thus retrospectively became a kind of pop star.” (Silke Bettermann, Beethoven im Bild, Die Darstellung des Komponisten in der bildenden Kunst vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, Bonn 2012, p.383).