In 1985, the American pop art artist created a series of screen prints ‘Reigning Queens’. Warhol portrayed the world's only four then-reigning queens in his signature colorful manner: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland. Warhol made four portraits of each queen, differing from each other in color and in the abstract color blocks overlaying them.
In his portraits of celebrities, Warhol explores his fascination with fame, wealth and social hierarchy, transforming traditional portraiture into the language of popular culture and giving it contemporary relevance. Warhol's best-known works were produced using the screen-printing process. His approach to art as a mass production process emphasizes the theme of repetition so prominent in consumer culture.
Andy Warhol
Reigning Queens (1985)
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (Edition of 40)
Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands (Edition of 40)
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (Edition of 40)
Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland (Edition of 40)
Each:
Screen print on Lenox Museum Board
Dimensions 100 x 80 cm / 39 3/8 x 31 1/2′′
Signed and numbered in pencil by the artist
ABOUT ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. He graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1949. Known as one of the most influential representatives and founder of the American Pop Art movement, he died in 1987 in New York city and leaves a substantial oeuvre of graphic prints, paintings and objects behind.
Early in his career Warhol worked as a commercial artist and illustrator, and towards the 1960s he began consolidating his well-known style of large-scale, colorful prints of popular consumer goods and other advertising related images that were prevalent in mass media. Warhol eventually became the main exponent of Pop Art, which introduced images of consumer culture into works of art that were manufactured with mass production techniques and blurred the boundaries between high and commercial art. His diverse oeuvre includes paintings, prints, sculptures and films that are often grouped in series that focus on different issues such as consumerism, violence, celebrity culture and even include socio-political commentary. At the same time, Warhol's works commented on the fundamentals of the medium by highlighting the conflict between medium and subject matter. He frequently transformed banal objects into items meant for adoration; and in other occasions his endless repetition of dramatic images stripped them of all meaning. Warhol's intriguing works are imbued with a poignant, powerful commentary and challenge to the status quo.
Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. His work is part of the most prestigious private and public collections such as the Museum Of Modern Art (MOMA), the Whitney Museum Of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York, the Art Institute Of Chicago, the Tate in London, and the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland just to name a few. The Andy Warhol Museum founded in 1994 in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.
ABOUT REIGNING QUEENS
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is often regarded as one of the most famous artists of the 20th century and pioneer of the pop art movement. His flat, clean, colorful compositions and large-format screen prints of images that represented American cultural values to him are widely known. The silkscreen technique he used for many of his works made it possible to reproduce the same image in large editions. In his studio The Factory in New York, he used photographs to create portraits of celebrities that he repeatedly reproduced in different color combinations. Legendary are the portrait series of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley.
In 1882, Warhol was given the idea by Amsterdam gallery owner George Mulder to portray the only four queens reigning at the time - Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland. On August 3, 1983, Mulder and Warhol signed the contract for the series of silkscreens that Warhol called “Reigning Queens”.
The queens were personally approached with the news that they would be portrayed in bright colors by the “King of Pop Art”. Mulder later said that the four queens reacted very differently to the news that they would be included in the series: Elizabeth reacted neutrally but liked her portrait, Margrethe was of the opinion that Andy Warhol was a bad influence on youth, Ntombi Twala had not heard of Warhol before, and Queen Beatrix was the only one of the reigning queens to react enthusiastically to the idea.
Warhol used existing (media) photographs to create his silkscreens. The prints of Queen Elizabeth II were based on the official photograph taken by Peter Grugeon at Windsor Castle on April 2, 1975, and released for the Silver Jubilee in 1977. Of Queen Beatrix, the official state photo taken of the queen by Max Koot just after the inauguration in 1980 is used as the basis for the pop art portrait. Warhol emphasizes the contours of the face and jewelry in the portraits with drawing lines and provides the portraits with various abstract color fields. This makes the whole thing look like a collage.
Warhol created four portraits of each queen, each differing from the other in coloring and in the squares and rectangles distributed across them. With a total of 16 works, this iconic portfolio is Warhol's largest portfolio of screen prints. The Reigning Queens series was released in two editions: 1) Reigning Queens, released in an edition of 40 prints per image plus 10 AP, 5 PP, 3 HC, 30 TP, signed and numbered in pencil. And 2) Reigning Queens (Royal Edition), released in an edition of 30 prints per image plus 5 AP, 2PP, 2 HC, signed and numbered in pencil. Of the Royal Edition, the contour lines in the portraits are accented with diamond dust. This dust, a byproduct of the production of industrial-grade diamonds, gives the prints a sparkling, extravagant effect.
Reigning Queens combines many themes that were central to Warhol's practice, such as celebrity, glamour, portraiture, commodification, gender and social hierarchy.
Most of the Reigning Queens screen prints were sold separately and scattered around the world. It is unknown how many Reigning Queens series have been broken up and how many remain intact. It is known, however, that few public institutions possess a complete series of silkscreens and that a complete series is offered only sporadically on the art market. This makes the Reigning Queens series one of the most sought-after series for art collectors, bringing record amounts time and again.
“It's difficult to know what will survive our times. However, my money is on Andy Warhol” declared Tom Armstrong, the famous former director of the Whitney Museum, in the foreword to a 1979 Warhol exhibition catalog. More than 40 years later, we can all agree that Armstrong was right. In recent years, the average value of Warhol's works has maintained a robust growth rate, with record sales reflecting his status as an icon of 20th-century art. The sustained demand underscores Warhol's lasting impact on contemporary art and his appeal to the global art market.
ABOUT SCREEN PRINTING
Pop art emerged in the mid-1950s as a revolutionary movement in the art world that challenged traditional notions of visual art by integrating images from popular culture and mass culture. Originating simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States, the movement aimed to blur the lines between high and low culture by celebrating everyday objects, advertising and mass production as legitimate subjects for artistic expression.
At its core, pop art sought to democratize art by making it more accessible and reflective of contemporary life. Artists drew inspiration from consumer goods, comic books, advertisements and other elements of popular culture, often using techniques of mechanical reproduction such as screen printing to emphasize the mass-produced nature of their subjects.
Andy Warhol in particular became synonymous with this movement the famous way he transformed everyday objects and celebrities into iconic images through his screen prints and paintings. In particular, the use of repetition and bold, vibrant colors in his screen prints underscored his fascination with consumer culture and celebrity worship, while simultaneously challenging traditional ideas about artistic creation and authorship.
Screen printing, also known as silk printing, is a versatile and popular printing technique that allows the transfer of vibrant, opaque colors onto a variety of materials. It is a technique that has been used for centuries, dating back to ancient China, but only became suitable for mass production in the 1960s thanks to the invention of the rotary screen-printing press by American entrepreneur and inventor Michael Vasilantone. This revolutionized the screen-printing industry both commercially and artistically.
The principle of screen-printing technology is the process of pressing ink through a stencilled mesh screen to create a printed design. The traditional process begins with a framework on which a piece of silk, or nowadays polyester or metal, is stretched tightly: the stencil or “screen.” And while the actual printing process is always fairly similar, the way the stencil is created can vary, depending on the materials used. Different stencilling techniques include:
- Using masking tape or vinyl to cover the desired areas of the screen.
- Painting the stencil onto the mesh using 'screen blockers' such as glue or lacquer.
- Using a light-sensitive emulsion to create a stencil, which is then developed in a similar way to a photograph.
Ink is then applied to the screen and smeared using a squeegee, printing the shape of the stencil onto the medium to be printed, such as canvas or paper. This technique can be repeated with different colors and shapes printed side by side or on top of each other. Each color is applied with a separate stencil, one at a time, to achieve the final look. The more colors printed, sometimes up to nine colors in Warhol's case, the more detailed and colorful the final product.
Andy Warhol's approach to photographic screen printing in 1962 revolutionized contemporary art by allowing mass reproduction of images from popular culture. He transferred an enlarged photographic image to a silkscreen. For this process, Warhol worked with professionals. After selecting the image, Warhol sent it to a commercial screen printer with a note about the desired size of the screen and the number of colors to be printed. After the screen was prepared for printing, it was sent back to The Factory, Warhol's studio in New York City, allowing for accurate printing in large quantities.
Warhol edited and enhanced the realistic images before printing them in vivid colors. To do this, he followed a meticulous process. He performed an underpainting as a base layer, traced the outline of a film positive and painted defined blocks of color. By integrating hand-painted backgrounds with photographic prints, Warhol realized unique works of art that bridged the mechanical and the manual, pursuing a machine-like approach to art creation.
Once he discovered the process and implications of working with silkscreens, the content of Warhol's production as a painter became inseparable from the process by which he created his art.