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Artist/Maker Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987)

Brooklyn Bridge, Trial proof

1983

Screen print on Lenox Museum Board

38 x 38 in.

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.104

In 1983, the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Commission charged the celebrity American artist Andy Warhol—the leading figure in the Pop Art movement—to create an image in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. If the bridge was an icon of the City, Warhol was an icon of New York art—world-famous, shocking, outrageously successful, and multi-talented (not only as an artist but also as a film director, rock band impresario of the Velvet Underground, and founder-editor of Interview magazine). Warhol’s image of the bridge served as the official artwork for the citywide event, and the 1983 Centennial Commission, Inc. published a final edition of two hundred of Warhol’s screen prints. Elie Hirschfield acquired both of these numbered trial proofs directly from the enigmatic and highly commercial Warhol, born Andrew Warhola and also known as the “Pope of Pop.” As their strong design reveals, Warhol built his art career on his success as a magazine, book, and advertising illustrator, whose works with head-on or gridded images of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and Marilyn Monroe’s face, among other fixtures of American commercial and celebrity culture, have become internationally recognized. The Brooklyn Bridge prints exemplify the artist’s signature photo-silkscreen technique, which he used with increasing ingenuity from the beginning of his career in 1962 to its premature end. Using his own photographs, those by others, and photo-reproductions from media, he transferred the pictures to screens, and exploited the gamut of printing possibilities, including blurring, flopping, and surprinting the screens, or printing them off-register for the appearance of an after-image or shadow. Spatial and temporal effects are playfully varied—are we looking north or south from Manhattan? Is it day or night? Yet the same tour boat steams under the arches in all the printings, suggesting Warhol used only one photograph for all of his bridges. These duplications imply the span’s function as a connector between two geographic points. With this doppelganger effect, the viewer can also travel roundtrip conceptually. Moreover, Warhol recognized that the dialogue between architect John Roebling’s arches and cables—stone and steel, mass and line—is what makes the bridge visually memorable: it is cut at one end by the screen edge and printed at the other to disappear into the distance, where its beginnings and endings are ambiguous. Like his screen prints of the Statue of Liberty (1986), which he created when Lady Liberty turned one hundred, Warhol’s Brooklyn Bridge prints contain a layered nostalgia for the depicted monument. By off-register printing the image in various colors, he formally increased those sentiments of time. The proofs resemble his serial prints and paintings enshrining mass-cultural Pop Art iconography. Many of them, such as his portrait of Elizabeth Taylor on a gold background, purposely resemble quasi-religious cultural icons. Indeed, notwithstanding his representations of jet-set glamor and immersion in disco club society, Warhol paradoxically clung to an archaic piety and devotion to the Catholic Church, which had nurtured him spiritually since childhood and sustained his fascination with the ultimate polarities of life and death. Photography and screen printing remained at the core of Warhol’s images and oeuvre. While his prints are different from any photographs of the storied bridge, such as those by Walker Evans (1928–30), or thousands of examples by other artists in various media, they echo the subject’s cachet. With their unexpected colors and abstracted compositions, Warhol’s take on the bridge introduces surreal randomness, which converts the storied span into a Pop Art superstar that is quintessentially Warholian. COMMUNITY VOICE My private lunch with “Andy” at his studio in Union Square in 1983 was amazing. He talked openly and showed me around, stepping on art spewed all over the floor. When we stopped at a window overlooking the Square, I mentioned that I was developing the project in construction at the other corner. From then on, he only wanted to talk real estate. We had a lot of fun. Elie Hirschfeld New York City real estate developer

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