Flowers

To create a body of work for an exhibition at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery that autumn, in June 1964 Warhol selected a photograph of hibiscus flowers he saw in Modern Photography magazine taken by Patricia Caulfield, the magazine’s executive editor. Cropping the image into a square format, Warhol sent for silkscreens in two sizes: 48- and 24-inch squares. By early the following year, Warhol was producing Flowers in ever diminishing scale, from 15- to 8- to 5-inch squares. This small jewel in black and white speaks to the flexibility and scalability of Warhol’s practice at this moment in the mid-1960s just before he moves his practice further away from painting, to experiments with wallpaper, the Silver Clouds, and film. The donor of this work worked at Castelli in these years and formed a close relationship with the artist; he gifted her this work, signing it on the back "Merry Christmas, Andy."