Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 12th November 2018

54 44 Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Golden Mushroom, from Campbell’s Soup II, 1969 (F. & S. II.62) hand signed in ball-point pen verso, stamp-numbered 94/250 verso screenprint in colours on smooth wove paper - number 94 from an edition of 250 (total edition includes 26 artist’s proofs). Printed by Salvatore Silkscreen Co., Inc., New York. Published by Factory Editions, New York. 89 x 58.5cm (35 x 23in) Provenance: Taylor Gallery, Belfast; Private Collection Literature: Feldman-Schellmann II.62 €20,000-€30,000 (£17,857-£26,785) One evening in 1962, the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto happened to see a work by Andy Warhol in the window of the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The work was a stack of screen-printed Brillo Boxes, just like the boxes you could find in the supermarket, but these were recreated by Warhol and they were empty. Danto realised in that moment that Warhol had transformed the whole notion of fine art. As far as he was concerned, things would never be the same again. Born in Philadelphia in 1930, Warhol had worked as a very successful commercial artist and illustrator in New York since the early 1950s. But now he was transforming the subjects and methods of popular and commercial culture into the currency of fine art. Pretty much every American, Danto realised, could understand a Warhol. You didn’t need knowledge of art history or any kind of insider information. At a stroke he had bypassed the pretensions of an art world elite - an elite that included Danto himself. Warhol went on to draw on any number of everyday subjects including, famously, Campbell’s Soup cans - of which there are three pristine examples here - dollar bills, advertising imagery and film stars. When Warhol used images of film stars, he didn’t aim for a classical studio portrait, he took ordinary publicity shots, as reproduced in newspapers and magazines, familiar to millions of people, made silkscreen versions of them, mechanically, but with some interven- tions, and produced them in multiples. His studio was called, appropriately, the Factory. His Ingrid Bergman has her in character as Sister Superior Mary Benedict in The Bells of St Mary’s. Aidan Dunne, October 2018