Andy Warhol Prints : Camouflage Paintings Portfolio

Andy Warhol Edition Prints -> Camouflage : Portfolio of eight screenprints with flourescent colors, i.e. a series of eight large format prints based on the works of Andy Warhol available for free download and subsequent printing.

Did you know you can print a Warhol with an online photo processor just by downloading these images and ordering up a print? Now that is pop art.

Andy Warhol > Edition Prints > FS-II.406

Click image of choice to download. Suggestion: image is very large — print ready 38″x38″ approximately or 11,400 pixels square approximately at 300 DPI. You should save to disk and view image with a proper image management software.

Artist Andy Warhol

Title Camouflage

Original Medium Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board.

Year 1987

Size 38″ x 38″

Original Edition Edition of 80, 3 PP, 1 EP, 84 individual TP not in portfolios, signed and numbered in pencil on verso by the executor of The Estate of Andy Warhol on a stamped certificate of authenticity.

Original Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith, New York

Original Publisher: Andy Warhol, New York

PRICE & AVAILABILITY Free, of course.

Production technique and statement:

Pop Art Machine’s adaptations of Andy Warhol’s Camouflage series is an interpretation of the artist’s original artwork using computer generated image techniques.

Pop Art Machine does not represent these images as actual Andy Warhol prints but mere representations of them based on thumbnail source images found in public archives.

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One of the last serial groups of paintings Warhol completed before his death in 1987, these paintings are inspired by the military motif of camouflage.

The Camouflage Paintings confront issues of pattern and design within the context of the New York School of Abstraction. Using an image which is itself a simplification of nature, Warhol addresses the history of landscape painting. As Thomas Kellein puts this irony in historical perspective for the introduction to his seminal exhibition “Warhol Abstracts”:

With the Camouflages, a military pattern that helped hide weapons of war in the landscape was brought into play for an abstract, informal flood of paintings. Warhol expanded the vegetable like effect of leaf-shaped sprigs and islands, first onto square, then onto rectangular formats, until the “all over” ideal of the Abstract Expressionists had been brought back to its familiar origin: the water lily paintings of Claude Monet. This historically burdened design was brightened and lightened by colors to such an extent that we stand in front of some spiritually emphatic testimony to abstract painting, ready to lose ourselves in the Camouflages as in a landscape.

Other quips:

There is a very terrible drama in these paintings, or a lighthearted one. Nothing in them which is not Government Issue, except the colors chosen. They don’t mean anything, nothing is expressed (what is ever expressed, anyway?) beyond certain formal relationships of color and form, line and plane. These often have reference to other artists, Gauguin, Dubuffet, Albers, and of course Matisse, among many others.

The middle range has the iconographic isolation of a Creecy or a Kandinsky. The largest are a tapestry mode, or a Vuillard wallpainting. But what is looked after by the artist is the unexciting relationship, at first, between plane and perspective, and then the two-color perspective indicating an active principle, finally the overwhelming primacy of the descriptive mode as a variable of contiguity, the sort of thing that is an aspect of visual illusion.

A giraffe’s head and shadow over a fried egg, an udder or glove under a branch, such images suggest themselves at first, then there is the Mediterranean Sea, various landscapes, etc. Impossible to know where you are, and that is where the irreducible poetry, unascertainable, but not indeterminate, comes into play.

Yet more blurbs:

Warhol is reported to have asked his studio assistants, “What can I do that would be abstract but not really abstract?” Camouflage gave him the opportunity to work with both an abstract pattern and an immediately recognizable image, rich in associations. Unlike military motifs, Warhol’s camouflage paintings reflect bright synthetic and inorganic colors, which would not provide a veil or disguise in any landscape. Created by artists at the military’s request, camouflage dates from the early 20th century. It was first used for concealment of equipment, and then for uniforms. As Warhol invented more camouflage works he incorporated the pattern into his self-portraits. In these works, the juxtaposition of identity and disguise mirrors the artist’s lifelong struggle to gain notoriety while keeping his own private life hidden.

Warhol also collaborated with the fashion designer Stephen Sprouse to create a line of camouflage clothing. This apparel brought the association of war into high fashion, although women dressed in camouflage gowns did not blend in, but instead attracted attention in urban settings. Over the past few decades the military has struggled to create an effective urban camouflage uniform, but hasn’t succeeded because the environment is constantly changing. Unfettered by such concerns, the main interest of contemporary urban clothing designers is to make a bold statement.

If you’d like to get your grubby little hands on the EPS vectors please email info@popartmachine.com and they’ll be sent right over.