Car Crash
Medium: Screenprint in colors on Curtis Rag paper
Year: circa 1978
Image: 20 7/8 x 36 3/8 inches (53 x 92.4 cm)
Sheet: 35 x 44 7/8 inches (88.9 x 114 cm)
Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith, New-York
Literature: Feldman and Schellmann IIIA.9
Unpublished print.
Based on an unidentified press photograph.
Created at approximately the same time as the 1979-80 Reversal series of paintings.
Car Crash is an outstanding and powerful work of art that reveals Warhol’s preoccupation with the contradictions inherent in public exposure and private despair.
Based on an unidentified press photograph, this image of a mangled car with its driver lying contorted, face down within the wreckage, belongs to what is arguably the most extraordinary, strange and disturbing source image of all those used in Warhol’s famous and seminal Death and Disaster series which he commenced in 1962. The work was created at approximately the same time as the 1979-80 Reversal Series of paintings. Adding to its rarity, Car Crash is an intimate and personal work because Warhol used to give such unique impressions to friends, colleagues and clients.
“But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn’t really have any effect… and I thought people should think about them some time… It’s not that I feel sorry for them; it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered.”
Immediately and universally recognizable, Car Crash shows Warhol’s ability to turn from common commercial objects, such as Campbell’s Soup, to a darker side of American culture. Here he captures a moment of reality, of transition, when life is extinguished into death, the banal and the mundane into the exceptional and extraordinary. The original photograph captivated Warhol’s imagination at precisely the same time that it terrified him.
As the academic Neil Printz has pointed out, it represents the painful aftermath of the car culture revolution of America in the 50s and 60s. The American dream turned into a nightmare: “The automobile as a vehicle of social mobility and leisure was a proud attainment of the working middle class during the prosperity of the post-war years. Pictures of car crashes represent a breach of faith in the products of the industrial revolution by featuring consumer products that bring death”. (Neil Printz, Painting Death in America, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, Houston, 1988, p. 17)
Warhol’s Car Crash is among the most powerful, challenging and provocative works made by any artist in the Post-War era.
Auction Results
Sotheby’s New-York: 27 September 2024
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 54,000
ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Car Crash, circa 1978
Screenprint on HMP paper
30 1/2 x 43 inches (77.5 x 109.2 cm)
Stamped © ANDY WARHOL (lower right)
This impression is one of a small number of impressions (there was no published edition)
Stamped by the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Inscribed UP48.20 on the verso
Christie’s New-York: 13 March 2024
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 52,920
ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Car Crash, circa 1978
Silkscreen in colors on Curtis Rag paper
Stamped and dated ‘Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., 1978’ (lower right)
Stamped again with the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. stamps
Numbered ‘WP890.23’ and ‘A171.042’ (on the reverse)
One of a small number of impressions
Christie’s New-York: 28 October 2015
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 185,000
ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Car Crash, circa 1978
Screenprint in black on wove paper
One of a small number of impressions
With the ‘The Estate of Andy Warhol’ and ‘Authorized by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ inkstamps on the reverse and annotated in pencil ‘UP48.16’
Sotheby’s London: 19 September 2012
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 250,000
GBP 157,250
ANDY WARHOL
Car Crash (F. & S. IIIA.9), 1978
Unique screenprint on Curtis Rag paper
Stamped Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc. 1978, with the Andy Warhol Estate stamp verso
Numbered WP890.22 in pencil
One of a limited number of impressions for personal use, there was no published edition