Andy Warhol – Martha Graham (Complete Set of Three) 1986

Martha Graham (Complete Set of Three) 1986
Feldman & Schellmann II.387–389

Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Martha Graham (F. & S. II.387–389)
Year: 1986
Medium: Three screenprints in colours on Lenox Museum Board
Sheet Size: 914 × 914 mm (36 × 36 in) — each
Edition: 100 + 25 Artist's Proofs — this set: /100
Signature: Each signed in pencil verso and numbered
Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith — blindstamp present
Publisher: Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.
Reference: Feldman & Schellmann II.387–389
Type: Complete set of three — limited edition screenprints

Description

Martha Graham (1986) is one of the most culturally charged and formally magnificent portfolios of Warhol's late career — a complete set of three large-format screenprints on Lenox Museum Board, each 914 × 914 mm, published by the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc. in the final year of Warhol's life. Martha Graham — the American dancer and choreographer whose revolutionary redefinition of modern dance ranks her among the most consequential cultural figures of the twentieth century — was for Warhol a natural subject: a woman who had transformed her body into a medium of expression, whose image across six decades of performance was as iconic and as loaded with cultural meaning as any of the celebrity faces he had subjected to his screenprint process since 1962.

The three prints deploy Warhol's full chromatic and graphic vocabulary at its most sophisticated: the source photographs — drawn from Graham's legendary performance archive — are translated into the flat, saturated colour fields and hard graphic outlines of the screenprint medium, each of the three panels presenting a different image, a different colourway, and a different emotional register. The square format — 914 × 914 mm, the same sheet size as the 1967 Marilyn portfolio — places Martha Graham in direct formal dialogue with Warhol's most celebrated works, asserting the dancer's cultural equivalence to the screen goddess in the most explicit possible terms.

The publication context is significant: by issuing the portfolio through the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Warhol situated the work within the institution it celebrates, making the prints both art objects and acts of cultural support — a gesture consistent with his lifelong engagement with the intersection of fine art, celebrity, and American cultural institutions. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith — the specialist printer responsible for Warhol's most important print productions of the 1970s and 1980s — with his blindstamp on each sheet. Referenced as Feldman & Schellmann II.387–389 in the definitive catalogue raisonné. This set is numbered /100

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