Car crashes, suicides and electric chairs followed. Warhol’s thematic treatment of death began in 1962 with 129 Die in Jet, which was based on a tabloid page covering an airplane crash taking place just two months before Marilyn Monroe’s death. Whether or not Gun was informed by the 1968 shooting, it nevertheless presents a continuation of Warhol’s longstanding fascination with a theme that had given rise to his aptly titled Death and Disaster series. Around the same time he was making these works, the artist stated: “I can’t say anything about because I’m not ready for it” (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, New York, 1977, p. Following Warhol’s return to painting after a self-imposed hiatus to focus on filmmaking between 19, this pervasive sense of mortality came to the fore again in his Skulls of 1976. Fearing that Solanas, who served only one year in prison due to mental instability, would attack him again, Warhol became consumed by an intense phobia of death – even foregoing a gallbladder operation for fear he would not survive. This traumatic event undoubtedly reverberates in Gun, which depicts a similar 0.22 revolver to the one that Solonas handed to the police along with the 0.32 automatic which she used for the crime. The near-fatal assassination on Jat the Factory both physically and psychologically scarred Warhol.
Gun was created a little more than a decade after Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, the occasional Warhol film actress and self-styled member of the revolutionary feminist group SCUM ("Society for Cutting Up Men"). Revealing the breadth of Warhol’s investigation of the theme of violence and death, Gun offers a striking argument for the continuum between his early and late work as is currently being revisited with the current Whitney Museum of American Art’s Andy Warhol-From A to B and Back Again, the first Warhol retrospective organized by a United States institution since 1989.
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As part of Warhol’s larger Gun series 1981-1982, of which examples reside in Tate, London, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, this work demonstrates Warhol's unerring, almost prophetic ability to select, isolate and transform a single image into a provocative icon as he here zooms in on the instrument, rather than the act of violence. Taking on the scale of a grand history painting, the present work depicts the gun in three-quarter view, silkscreened in black over the white canvas like an X-ray. It was through the lens of detachment that Warhol approached the existential subject of mortality, here isolating and monumentalizing the object depicted locked and loaded in his 1963 Elvis silkscreens.
In a corpus revolving around celebrity, death and tragedy, it takes a critical position amongst the car crashes, race riots and electric chairs of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series from the early 1960s. Andy Warhol’s Gun, 1981-1982, offers the viewer a monumental memento mori of the modern age.
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