Andy Warhol ”Lenin”. 1986

Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas. 56 × 40 cm (22 × 15 ¾ in.). Signed and dated on the overlap in black felt-tip pen: Andy Warhol 86. A label from Galerie Bernd Klüser, Munich, affixed to the reverse.. Catalogue raisonné: Date not covered in the catalogue raisonné by Frei/Prince. [3021] Framed, Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas. 56 × 40 cm (22 × 15 ¾ in.). Signed and dated on the overlap in black felt-tip pen: Andy Warhol 86. A label from Galerie Bernd Klüser, Munich, affixed to the reverse.. Catalogue raisonné: Date not covered in the catalogue raisonné by Frei/Prince. [3021] Framed, Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired from Galerie Bernd Klüser, Munich, circa 1987), Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired from Galerie Bernd Klüser, Munich, circa 1987), Lenin by Warhol. Munich, Galerie Bernd Klüser, 1987, ill. p. 50, On 24 February 1987, the exhibition „Lenin by Warhol“ opened at Galerie Klüser in Munich, presenting a series of portraits of the communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union. It would prove to be the last major series Warhol created during his lifetime. Just two days earlier, he had died unexpectedly in New York at the age of only 58. The lasting effects of the assassination attempt on the artist 19 years earlier had undoubtedly taken their toll. There is a striking biographical parallel here with the protagonist of his final series: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was also the victim of an assassination attempt. Although he initially survived the attack with severe injuries, he died in 1924 at the age of just 53 from its long-term consequences. At the suggestion of his gallerist, Bernd Klüser, Warhol selected a detail from a photograph taken in 1897 as the source image for his Lenin series, from which he created two distinct versions. The present work belongs to the more tightly cropped and concentrated version of the series. It is also one of the rarer examples executed in an intense red that inevitably evokes the colour of the Soviet Union. Within the series, the red works most clearly emphasise the connection between the image and Lenin’s political legacy. Our work was included in the exhibition at Galerie Klüser and acquired there around 1987. It has remained in the same private collection ever since. After almost four decades, it is now appearing on the art market for the first time. Positioned centrally within the frame, Lenin’s face dominates the entire composition. Unlike earlier portrait series, which are characterised by a more painterly quality, Warhol focuses here on precisely placed lines that clearly delineate Lenin’s features. The intense red heightens the image’s graphic impact, while subtle gradations within the face preserve its individual characteristics. The delicate pink of the face creates a soft contrast, lending the portrayal a surprising physical presence and preventing Lenin from becoming a mere propaganda figure. The tightly cropped image directs the viewer’s gaze straight towards Lenin’s eyes, creating an almost face-to-face encounter with the historical figure. The original photograph from which the detail was taken depicts Lenin, then still known by his birth name, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, among a group of young revolutionaries belonging to the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg, which he had co-founded. Lenin sits at the centre of the photograph, his arm resting on a stack of books as he looks into the camera with a serious, focused expression. He appears not as a proletarian street fighter, but as a young intellectual engaged with revolutionary writings and new ideas. By the time the photograph was taken, he had already been arrested several times. That same year, he was sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. After his return, he adopted the name “Lenin” and became the leader of the Bolsheviks, marking the beginning of his rise to become the movement’s most powerful figure and, later, the dominant figure in the Soviet Union. Even in the photograph, the young man’s extraordinary historical significance seems almost palpable. None of his fellow revolutionaries projects the same intensity or force of will. The detail photograph on which Warhol’s Lenin series is based was produced in 1948, long after Lenin’s death, when the idealisation of his image had already reached an early peak. The crop was presumably created for propaganda purposes, meaning that Warhol translated into his own visual language an image that had itself already been shaped by the mechanisms of political agitation. By this time, the men surrounding Lenin had long since been forgotten and, quite literally, cut out of the picture. The encounter between Andy Warhol and a figure such as Lenin generates a particular tension, rooted in their diametrically opposed worldviews. On one side stands Warhol, who embodied Western consumer society perhaps more fully than any other personality of his time; on the other, Lenin, co-founder of the Soviet Union, which explicitly rejected precisely this kind of society. Warhol portrayed Lenin in 1986, at a time when the political system Lenin had helped establish was already showing the first signs of its impending demise. Mikhail Gorbachev continued to pursue his reform programme of glasnost and perestroika, while the superpowers gradually began to engage in dialogue. Just three years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Lenin had already become an intensely controversial political figure during his lifetime. In 1922, he played a key role in the founding of the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist state, yet the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror also laid the foundations for the reign of terror under his successor, Stalin. Nevertheless, after Lenin’s death, an almost religious cult developed around the former leader in the Soviet Union. His body was embalmed and placed on public display, and it remains in a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square to this day. Warhol, however, was less concerned with Lenin’s political morality or historical responsibility than with the mechanics of his fame. All of Warhol’s portraits follow this principle. Whether Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O., Elvis, Mao or Lenin, Warhol made no distinction between a film star and a dictator. For him, the individual personality had long since receded behind the all-encompassing public image. In Lenin’s case, decades of state propaganda had already firmly established the icon. It is therefore particularly noteworthy that Warhol chose not to depict the statesman, but the young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, capturing the moment at which a young revolutionary begins to become a historical icon. Once again, the work demonstrates Warhol’s remarkable instinct for identifying moments of decisive historical significance. Warhol’s decision to make Lenin the subject of his final major series seems almost fateful. Few figures of the twentieth century unite power, myth and political immortality to a comparable degree. Shortly after completing the series, Warhol himself died; just a few years later, the political system whose founding figure Lenin had been also disappeared. As Warhol had already understoof, in the end, only the images endure. FvW

Estimate:£292,582.5

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