Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical (re)production, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
As famous for his quips as for his art—he variously mused that “art is what you can get away with” and “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”—Warhol drew widely from popular culture and everyday subject matter, creating works like his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), Brillo pad box sculptures, and portraits of Marilyn Monroe, using the medium of silk-screen printmaking to achieve his characteristic hard edges and flat areas of color. Known for his cultivation of celebrity, Factory studio (a radical social and creative melting pot), and avant-garde films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Andy Warhol was also a mentor to artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
His Pop sensibility is now standard practice, taken up by major contemporary artists Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons, among countless others.
Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential artists in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars.
The subject of ‘Dollar Bills’ had provided the motif for Warhol’s breakthrough series of 1961, which in turn had prompted his revolutionary exploration of the silkscreen process for creating his paintings.
Twenty years on Andy Warhol revisited the subject of money, this time focussing on the elegant curvilinear form of the dollar sign itself.
Unlike the monochromatic and static 1961 ‘Dollar Bill’ paintings, Warhol’s 1981 ‘Dollar Signs’ pulsated with vibrant hues, layered energy, as if celebrating the artist’s mastery over his adopted medium. Based on one of Warhol’s own drawings, the stylised $ motif here seems to reverberate in crimson red, pink and gold against a baby-blue background.
In his seminal 1989 publication on the artist, David Bourdon reflects,
“Warhol’s Dollar Signs are brazen, perhaps even insolent reminders that pictures by brand-name artists are metaphors for money, a situation that never bothered him”.
