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

Watermelon (from Space Fruit: Still Lifes) 1979
Feldman & Schellmann II.199

Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Watermelon (from the Space Fruit: Still Lifes portfolio)
Year: 1979
Medium: Screenprint in colours on Lenox Museum Board
Image Size: 77 × 102 cm (30 1/2 × 40 in)
Sheet Size: 82 × 102 cm (32 1/4 × 40 1/8 in)
Designation: Proof apart from the edition of 150
Inscription: Inscribed verso "A215.091" with authentication stamp
Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith, New York
Publisher: Grippi/Zivian, Inc., New York
Reference: Feldman & Schellmann II.199
Frame: Framed (black frame, as shown)

Description

Watermelon (1979) is the most chromatically explosive image in Andy Warhol's Space Fruit: Still Lifes portfolio — a composition of absolute graphic authority in which a single whole watermelon, rendered in deep teal and black, sits on a magenta-to-pink graduated ground against a field of overlapping red rectangles, its shadow cast in purple across the lower register. The palette is simultaneously fruit-stand literal and entirely artificial: the teal is no colour a watermelon's skin has ever been, the magenta is no surface a kitchen table has ever presented, and the red behind is closer to a Communist poster than a domestic setting. Warhol understood, as no one else in his generation did, that colour could be simultaneously wrong and more right than any accurate description.

The composition is Warhol at his most formally confident — a single object, centred, massive, filling the picture plane with an authority that transforms the most democratic of summer fruits into something monumental and strange. The layered red rectangles behind provide the same structural function as the layered coloured grounds in his Mao and Marilyn works: a constructed background that asserts its own presence rather than receding into neutrality, making the colour field as much the subject as the object it surrounds.

This impression is a proof apart from the main edition of 150 — inscribed verso "A215.091" with the authentication stamp — an impression produced outside the numbered edition and among the most desirable categories of Warhol print. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith and published by Grippi/Zivian, Inc., New York. Referenced as Feldman & Schellmann II.199 in the definitive catalogue raisonné. Presented framed in a black frame.

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