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, such as for this one, which he made for a presentation of hundreds of such pictures at Ileana Sonnabend’s Paris gallery in May 1965. For his presentations of these series, the artist tiled the walls with multitudes of variants, and this jewel-like work speaks to the flexibility and scalability of Warhol’s practice at this moment in the mid-1960s, just before he moved further away from painting to experiments with wallpaper, the Silver Clouds, and film.