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polity united states cold warconcept:era contemporary

Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)

Silkscreen ink and silver paint on canvas by Andy Warhol, 1963. A diptych from the Death and Disaster series consisting of a repeated photographic transfer of a highway car crash scene on a silver ground, paired with a blank silver panel. One of the most important and large-scale works from Warhol's early 1960s examination of death, media, and spectacle. Sold at Sotheby's New York on 13 November 2013 for $105,445,000.

Scholarly Significance

Extend the Warhol / Pop Art cluster with Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963), the most significant work from Warhol's Death and Disaster series and a canonical case of hostile contemporary reception yielding posthumous canonization.

Notes

  • ·The crash photograph source is an unidentified wire-service press photograph of a highway accident.
  • ·The blank silver panel paired with the crash image is compositionally deliberate — Warhol described the empty panel as 'nothing' facing 'something', a visual meditation on absence.
  • ·The work was shown at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, in 1964, in an exhibition of the Death and Disaster series that received hostile reviews from French critics who found the subject matter macabre and sensationalistic.
  • ·Subsequent rehabilitation came in the 1980s as the series was recontextualized within media theory and postmodern discussions of the spectacle.