Death and Disaster (Andy Warhol)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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"The "Death and Disaster" paintings (such as "Red Car Crash", "Purple Jumping Man"[1], "Orange Disaster"[2] transform personal tragedies into public spectacles, and signal the use of images of disaster in the then evolving mass media." --S. Stein

The 'Death and Disaster' series is a loose group of works by Andy Warhol that produced between 1962 and 1965. Warhol noted in Popism that it was Henry Geldzahler, then curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

"who gave me the idea to start the Death and Disaster series. We were both having lunch one day in the summer [of 1962] … and he laid the Daily News out on the table. The headline was '129 die in jet', and that's what started me on the death series - the Car Crashes, the Disasters, the Electric Chairs…"

Electric chair screenprints

Warhol began making electric chair screenprints in 1963, the same year as the two final executions in New York State. Over the next decade, he repeatedly returned to the subject, reflecting the political controversy surrounding the death penalty in America. The photograph on which he based his screenprints was of the chair in Sing Sing Penitentiary. It was released by the World Wide Photo press service in 1953 in conjunction with the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

See also

• Electric chair 1967