Jamie Wyeth b. 1946

The deaths of Warhol, in 1987, and Nureyev, in 1995, were moments for Wyeth to process all that he had absorbed of his famous subjects. From the remove of decades, he could call up discrete moments and arrange them into larger contexts. He painted his friends again as if they still lived, as the stuff of elaborate dreams, accommodating them into the surrealist direction that his painting was taking.

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Before the sale of Warhol’s vast estate in 1988, few outside his closest circle of friends knew that the artist who riffed on commercial art and mocked America’s consumerism had surrounded himself with bounteous beautiful furnishings, ethnographic and folk arts, and kitschy things in the sumptuous setting of an historic townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. [1] In advance of its disassembly, the townhouse was opened to old friends for one last extended party. The media event that was the ten-day sale was full Warhol, back from the dead and claiming the limelight once more. In 2002, Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum featured a large array of these objects again in a groundbreaking exhibition and catalogue that for the first time looked at Warhol in the context of his possessions. The spirit of Warhol was newly animated by these events. It returned to haunt Wyeth’s imagination.

The monochrome Warhol of Wyeth’s 1976 drawings occupies a technicolor world now, reflecting the dazzling color sensations created by his carpets, wallpapers, brocades, mahogany, silver, gold, and more. Wyeth painted Warhol casually seated at a shiny French Art Deco brass sideboard, an extraordinary item that he has appropriated for his unextraordinary daily activities, delivering his diary thoughts into the phone to his secretary while watching soap operas on TV. [2] Warhol and his soaps drone on, their monotony present in the paintings as waves of calligraphic arabesques. 

[1] The sale, at Sotheby’s, New York, spanned ten days, from April 23-May 3, 1988; totaled over 10,000 individual objects; and spread over two acres of exhibition space. See John W.. Smith, ed., Possession Obsession; Andy Warhol and Collecting (Pittsburgh: The Andy Warhol Museum, 2002).

[2] Referred to as a desk in Wyeth’s inscription, the piece is a Brass and Black Marble Sideboard, lot 363, The Andy Warhol Collection: Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Sotheby’s, New York, April 23, 1988.