Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)

Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482)

screenprint on Arches Aquarelle paper

sheet: 32 x 44 inches (81.4 x 112 cm)

framed: 37 3/25 x 49 1/2 inches (94.3 x 125.7 cm)

Executed in 1984. This work is an impression, outside of the regular edition.

Published by Editions Schellmann & Klüser, Munich and New York.

PROVENANCE:

Rupert Jasen Smith

Donald Sussman, gift from the above

Private collection, 1985

Acquired from the above by the present owner

LITERATURE:

Feldman & Schellmann II.318

NOTES:

Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) emerged as a pioneering figure at the forefront of the 1960s Pop Art movement. His vivid silkscreens of Campbell’s Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroe, and other commercial icons blurred the lines between fine art, mass production and advertising. Working across film, photography, painting and printmaking, Warhol upended traditional notions of authorship and elevated the artist to celebrity status. His Factory studio became an incubator for artistic innovation, and his incisive critique of consumerism and fame continues to shape contemporary art and popular culture today.

Warhol’s Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482) reconfigures a canonical Renaissance image through radical cropping and heightened color, disrupting the original narrative of the source material. By isolating Venus and translating her into the language of silkscreen, Warhol elevates Botticelli’s goddess into a modern superstar, collapsing the distance between divine beauty, celebrity, and mass reproduction.