Andy Warhol – Children Playing Ring Around the Rosie (Happy December) 1954

Children Playing Ring Around the Rosie (Happy December) 1954

Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Children Playing Ring Around the Rosie (Happy December)
Year: 1954
Medium: Offset lithograph on lightweight yellow Adirondack Bond paper, full sheet
Image Size: 16.5 × 22.8 cm (6 1/2 × 8 7/8 in)
Sheet Size: 21.7 × 28 cm (8 1/2 × 11 in)
Authentication: Estate of Andy Warhol inkstamp; Visual Arts Foundation inkstamp; initialled "T.J.H." by Timothy J. Hunt of the Andy Warhol Foundation; annotated "PM09.0287" in pencil on reverse
Frame: Framed

Description

Children Playing Ring Around the Rosie (Happy December) (1954) is an extraordinarily rare and historically significant work from Andy Warhol's pre-fame commercial period — a time before the Campbell's soup cans, before the Factory, before the Marilyns, when Warhol was one of New York's most sought-after commercial illustrators, producing delicate, whimsical drawings for department store advertisements, greeting cards, record covers, and fashion magazines. This offset lithograph — produced in 1954 on lightweight yellow Adirondack Bond paper, the kind of stock associated with commercial printing rather than fine art — captures Warhol's early illustrative style at its most disarming: children in a circle, the universal game of Ring Around the Rosie, rendered with the blotted-line technique he developed at Carnegie Mellon and refined during his early New York years, in which ink drawn on non-absorbent paper is transferred to absorbent paper to produce a distinctive, slightly broken line of extraordinary elegance.

The work predates by nearly a decade the Pop Art breakthrough that would make Warhol one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century — and yet every element of his mature sensibility is already present: the interest in the vernacular, the commercial image elevated by the quality of the draughtsmanship, the flat surface that simultaneously describes and decorates. The yellow paper is not incidental: it is the material of the trade, the colour of the office, the substrate of the everyday world that Warhol was already treating as artistic raw material.

There was no published edition of this work — it exists in only a small number of impressions, making each example genuinely rare. This impression carries the full weight of Andy Warhol Foundation authentication: the Estate of Andy Warhol inkstamp, the Visual Arts Foundation inkstamp, the initials "T.J.H." of Timothy J. Hunt — the Foundation's registrar, whose initials on a Warhol work are among the most authoritative authentication marks available — and the inventory annotation "PM09.0287" in pencil on the reverse. Presented framed.

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