Andy Warhol – Cantaloupes I (from Space Fruit: Still Lifes) 1979

Cantaloupes I (from Space Fruit: Still Lifes) 1979
Feldman & Schellmann II.95

Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Cantaloupes I (from the Space Fruit: Still Lifes portfolio)
Year: 1979
Medium: Screenprint in colours on Lenox Museum Board
Dimensions: 82 × 102 cm (32 1/4 × 40 1/8 in)
Designation: Proof apart from the edition of 150
Inscription: Inscribed verso "A183.091" with authentication stamp
Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith, New York
Publisher: Grippi/Zivian, Inc., New York
Reference: Feldman & Schellmann II.201
Type: Proof impression — aside from the edition of 150

Description

Cantaloupes I (1979) is one of the most formally accomplished and chromically surprising works from Andy Warhol's Space Fruit: Still Lifes portfolio — a series in which he returned to the oldest subject in Western art history, the still life, and subjected it to the same chromatic transformation he had applied to Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, and the electric chair. Five cantaloupes, rendered in warm amber and black against a composition of overlapping blue and teal rectangles, float in a pictorial space that has nothing to do with the domestic tradition of the genre and everything to do with the graphic environment of 1970s commercial design — the "space" of the title suggesting both the compositional void and the visual register of the work.

The cantaloupes are simultaneously hyper-real and entirely artificial: the texture of their skin rendered with photographic precision by Rupert Jasen Smith's screenprinting, the colour flat and saturated, the shadows absolute black, the background a combination of cobalt and periwinkle blue that situates the fruit in a chromatic field of pure Pop invention. The teal element — a dish or tray beneath and between the fruits — introduces a further colour that completes the palette with the assurance of a colourist working at the height of their powers.

This impression is a proof apart from the main edition of 150 — inscribed verso "A183.091" with the authentication stamp — placing it in the category of impressions produced outside the numbered edition and typically considered among the most desirable. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York — the specialist printer responsible for many of Warhol's most important print productions of the 1970s — and published by Grippi/Zivian, Inc., New York. Referenced as Feldman & Schellmann II.201 in the definitive catalogue raisonné of Warhol's prints

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