Andy Warhol – Satyric Festival Song (from Martha Graham) 1986

Satyric Festival Song (from Martha Graham) 1986

Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Satyric Festival Song (from Martha Graham)
Year: 1986
Medium: Screenprint in colours on Lenox Museum Board
Sheet & Image Size: 912 × 912 mm (approx. 36 × 36 in)
Designation: Unsigned and unnumbered proof — presumably unique in this colour variation
Authentication: Estate of Andy Warhol inkstamp; Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board inkstamp; annotated "144A UT.008" in pencil on reverse
Publisher: Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.
Reference: Feldman & Schellmann II.387
Type: Unique colour variant proof — aside from standard edition of 100 + 25 Artist's Proofs

Description

Satyric Festival Song (1986) is the first and most celebrated print in Warhol's Martha Graham portfolio — and this impression is something rarer still: an unsigned and unnumbered proof in a colour variation presumed to be unique, produced alongside but entirely distinct from the standard edition of 100 plus 25 artist's proofs. Where the standard edition presents Martha Graham in a defined and consistent colourway, this proof explores a different chromatic proposition — a working document of the artist's process, a moment of decision preserved on Lenox Museum Board rather than discarded, and authenticated by two of the most authoritative bodies in the Warhol market.

Martha Graham — the American choreographer who founded modern dance as a serious art form and who performed and taught into her nineties — was for Warhol a figure of extraordinary fascination: a woman who had made her own body the instrument of an entirely new visual and physical language, whose image across six decades of performance carried the same iconic charge as the celebrity faces he had been screenprinting since 1962. Satyric Festival Song takes its title from one of Graham's most celebrated choreographic works — a piece about the Dionysian, the ecstatic, the release of the body from the control of the rational mind — and Warhol's chromatic treatment honours that spirit: the colour in this proof variant operating with an intensity and a freedom that suggests experimentation rather than production, the artist at the moment before the edition is fixed.

The authentication record is exceptionally complete: the Estate of Andy Warhol inkstamp, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board inkstamp, and the inventory annotation "144A UT.008" in pencil on the reverse — three layers of institutional authentication that confirm both the work's genuine status and its registration in the Foundation's records. The presumed uniqueness of this colour variant makes it not merely a rare impression but a singular object: the only surviving example of a chromatic decision Warhol made and then set aside, preserved by the authentication process that followed his death. Referenced as Feldman & Schellmann II.387

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