Andy Warhol’s obsession with iconic images and brand-name celebrities led him to appropriate famous paintings by other artists as a means of exploring the constructs of fame and legacy themselves. Over the years, Warhol chose subjects that allowed him to explore the duality of public perception and self-projection and his most enduring images resonate with these ideas of identity. Warhol’s depictions of other artists’ works, including Woman in Blue (After Matisse), offer an intriguing play upon this familiar theme and an opportunity to interpret, transform and even commodify the art of his predecessors.
In the early 1980s Warhol produced a number of works based upon the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and Henri Matisse, among others. These paintings were often faithful reproductions albeit flattened by the silkscreen process and candy colors. Deceptively simple, Warhol’s interpretations of these masterpieces acknowledge their status as commodities -both the works and their creators. Warhol’s version of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, for example, presents her as a Pop culture phenomenon and cash cow on par with Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. Warhol’s paintings of paintings, and their source material, are instantly recognizable; they are high art, and high value, versions of the museum posters owned by millions of people around the world.
From the earliest days of his career, Andy Warhol had a strong appreciation for—and encyclopedic knowledge of—art history. Beginning in 1963 with his reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in a series of several paintings, the Pop artist would often return to the annals of visual art for source material.
The genius behind Warhol’s art historical references lies not in his ability to accurately duplicate his predecessors (he left that to the precision of his screening), but to start a conversation about iconic works of art and their place within the cultural consciousness. Like advertising images, logos, or celebrity headshots, famous works of art transcend the museum space and the dusty art historical tome. They take up residence in the present, stripped of many previous allusions and instead existing as icons to be revered, copied, referenced, and put on dorm room posters. They are separated from their referents by so many steps that the aura of the original metamorphoses into something greater than the singular image itself. Warhol understood this transferal of meaning, and through his paintings sought to level the playing field.
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, Just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
Throughout his career, Warhol consistently equated himself to his work and vice versa. His predilection for mass-media tropes and mechanical processes may seem at odds with the highly emotive oeuvre of Edvard Munch, but the two artists had a shared appreciation for tumultuous love and their own mortality. Hidden behind the iconic, oft-reproduced surfaces of their works is a deeply somber inquiry into humanity itself.
Introduction
In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major retrospective of work by the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Inspired by the media coverage of that show, Andy Warhol took images of de Chirico’s work as the subject for a new group of paintings produced that year. Like his paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy which used material that circulated in the pop culture tabloids, or even works of high art like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which made a media sensation when it was exhibited in New York in 1963, Warhol drew inspiration from the headliners of the day.
“De Chirico repeated the same images throughout his life. I believe he did it not only because people and dealers asked him to do it, but because he liked it and viewed repetition as a way of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common.”
Ironically though, the source image for Warhol’s After de Chirico series were not included in the exhibition at MoMA. As art critic Robert C. Morgan reports, a “disclaimer printed in the catalogue and mounted on the exhibition walls stated that works from the late period of the artist (after 1928) suffered a decline and therefore would not be included in the exhibition” (R. Morgan, “A Triple Alliance: de Chirico, Picabia, Warhol,” The Brooklyn Rail, Mar. 1, 2004, n.p.). Thus, a significant portion of the artist’s work was excluded from the exhibition, because as Warhol notes, de Chirico repeated the same compositions as many as a hundred times over the course of his life. It was these very works, excluded from the official history of both art and de Chirico’s production that inspired Warhol. Where MoMA curators felt the artist was repetitive, Warhol found a kindred spirit.
Warhol met de Chirico in 1974 and the two artists developed a strong friendship in the last year of the artist’s life. It was Carlo Berlotti, the Italian collector and businessman who introduced Warhol and de Chirico, who suggested that Warhol adopt de Chirico’s work as his subject matter. The two developed a strong friendship in the final years of the older artist’s life.
“Every time I saw de Chirico’s paintings I felt close to him. Every time I saw him I felt I had known him forever. I think he felt the same way … Once he made the remark that we both had white hair!”
Warhol, who had long been subverting the traditional values of originality, inspiration and handmade spontaneity in art, clearly appreciated the embrace of replication and parody in de Chirico’s much-maligned later work. He became fascinated by de Chirico’s process.
“How did he repeat the same images? Did he project the same image on the canvas? Maybe he did it by dividing the canvas in sections … he could have used a silkscreen!”
Warhol’s first foray in painting from art was in 1963 when he reproduced the Mona Lisa – undoubtedly the most famous face in all of art history. She had recently been on show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and had stirred up quite a media storm that drew Warhol in, more so than the painting itself. It was not until 20 years later that Warhol truly returned to art history as his main subject. In his Art from Art series, Warhol pays the ultimate form of tribute to the most renowned and recognized works by Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso by repainting, repeating, and renewing these masterpieces in his own Warholian style.
Warhol, whose name had become synonymous with the contemporary images of his time, actually had very significant ties to the traditional arts as well. He was one of the founding board members of the New York Academy of Art, which opened in 1980 – only two years prior to the production of the present work. It aimed to revive the traditional teaching of fine art from the historical academies, involving drawing from life models and plaster casts, but also from mannequins and previous artistic masters. As the century began to come to a close, this reflective mentality of looking back in history was very much particular to this twilight time (Robert Rosenblum, ‘Warhol as Art History,’ in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andy Warhol Retrospective, 1989, pp. 25 and 32).
The Two Sisters (After de Chirico)
An encounter between two artistic titans – Andy Warhol and Giorgio de Chirico – is orchestrated across the canvas in The Two Sisters (After de Chirico), here Warhol repeats and re-imagines de Chirico’s Oreste e Pilade (1962) four times in striking swathes of brilliant reds, greens, blues, and yellows. As a part of Warhol’s magnificent Art from Art series, the present work appropriates de Chirico’s metaphysical mannequin heads, only to reframe them in a distinctly Warholian aesthetic of bold colors and simplified black accents.
In de Chirico’s painting, the heads of two mannequins, a wooden one in the foreground, and a fabric-covered on behind it, are grouped together in an open-air, yet claustrophobic room. The bell tower of the Cathedral of Ferrara—de Chirico’s hometown made famous in the landscapes of his paintings—is visible through the window behind the mannequin heads. Masks displays all the qualities of de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting style developed in the 1910s—saturated colors, warm late-in-day Mediterranean light that casts deep, long, raking shadows, and a desolate landscape that bears the trace of occupation but without people in sight. Together these elements contribute to the ominous tones and the dreamlike qualities of the artist’s haunting and uncanny scenes, which would inspire the Surrealists a generation later. After his famed Metaphysical period, the artist would increasingly turn to mannequins as his subject, suggesting the absent figures in his landscapes.
Warhol’s version of de Chirico’s painting repeats its image in a grid of four in a technicolored reorganization of the four colors of the CMYK printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and key black. Blocks of red clash with pink and a blue line traverses the horizontal plane of the canvas twice. According to art historian Robert Rosenblum, Warhol “clearly recognized the positive aspects of de Chirico’s so often maligned later work, namely its full embrace of the possibilities of repetition, of factory-style, of existing works, and its undermining of those traditions of originality, inspiration, and handmade spontaneity which Warhol, in his own ways, had been subverting since the 1960s” (R. Rosenblum quoted in R. Morgan, “A Triple Alliance). Recontextualized through Warhol’s Pop vision, de Chirico’s mannequins are reconnected to their commercial function.
Warhol’s artistic piracy crops de Chirico’s original painting and selectively plucks out certain elements from it, so that they become further emphasized in The Two Sisters (After de Chirico). The blues, reds, greens, and yellows that are carefully contained within the lines of de Chirico’s mannequin heads are given further vibrancy and dynamism by Warhol, who takes this color combination and aggressively silkscreens it across the entire canvas, disobeying all lines and logic. As such, despite the contrast in artistic sensibilities between Warhol and de Chirico, there emerge certain visual affinities and thematic resonances from their engagement. In addition to resonating with de Chirico himself, the present work also recalls Warhol’s own stylized portraits through which he rose to critical acclaim. Like the overwhelmingly repeated faces of Mona Lisa in Thirty Are Better Than One (1963) or Marilyn Monroe in Marilyn x 100 (1962), this is a double portrait hypnotically multiplied four times on the canvas, as to showcase eight faces. In vibrant colors, these generic mannequin heads also make reference to Warhol’s tendency to simultaneously simplify, accentuate, and obscure facial details to the point where all his portraits come to look stylishly alike: a string of faces wearing slightly off-kilter, brightly colored masks or makeup.
The present work is therefore a powerful painting about Warhol repeating de Chirico, but also about Warhol repeating himself. Warhol has most memorably demonstrated the productive potential of appropriation: through repetition, fresh perspectives of the past can be discovered. As such, the present work not only evokes an artistic lineage between two artistic greats, but it is also melancholic in its tendency to look backwards – especially since it was created in the last five years of Warhol’s life. In 1989, two years after his death, the last quarter of the Twentieth Century would come to be known as the ‘Age of Warhol’, and Robert Rosenblum would further claim that Warhol was not only a part of art history, but that he should be remembered as art history – a bold statement that confirms this painting’s status as an icon of art history itself.
The Two Sisters (after de Chirico), 1982
Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2024
Estimated: HKD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
HKD 9,144,000 / USD 1,169,010
ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
The Two Sisters (after de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50 1/4 x 41 3/4 inches (127.5 x 106 cm)
Signed and dated 82 on the overlap
Mapped out as a shimmering vision of mechanically repetitive, technicolor frames, the iconic The Two Sisters (after de Chirico) orchestrates a collision of two of the greatest artistic minds of the Twentieth Century: Andy Warhol and Giorgio de Chirico. Enacting an astute philosophical contemplation on the power of image-making within the modern age, this work forms part of a series which saw Warhol return to ‘art’ as a subject. Warhol thus shifted the role of the artist from the position of sole creator to one of keen observer and cultural arbiter. As a technically daring and visually stunning embodiment of this claim, The Two Sisters (after de Chirico) holds a poignant place in the history of twentieth-century image making. Here, Warhol repeats and re-imagines de Chirico’s Oreste e Pilade (1962) four times in striking swathes of brilliant reds, greens, blues, and yellows. As a part of Warhol’s magnificent Art from Art series, the present work appropriates de Chirico’s metaphysical mannequin heads, only to reframe them in a distinctly Warholian aesthetic of bold colours and simplified black accents.
Vertical strands of acidic yellow, greens and blues clash with horizontal reds and turquoises marking the mechanical linearity of Warhol’s silkscreen technique. Instantly attributable to the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, here the image is defamiliarised through impersonal repetition, as if it has been cut from a longer string of prints, or perhaps the negative of a film. By the time the present work was produced, Warhol had already achieved fame and fortune for his stylised silkscreen paintings of the 1960s and ’70s, which transformed images into high-art icons. He endlessly and obsessively repeated the likeness of celebrities, Pop culture icons, and the mass media images over and over again, and in so doing, re-enacted the kind of mechanical reproduction of images that were splashed across the covers of newspapers and television screens. This modus operandi took on another dimension when Warhol began appropriating images not only from contemporary mass culture, but also from the Old Masters and modern giants of the historical art world itself. Warhol first reproduced an iconic art historic image after Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was exhibited in New York in 1963 for the first time, certifying that artworks are also party to the fame that fascinated Warhol endlessly. However it was not until the early 1980s that he returned to this theme, taking into his visual repertoire Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, as well as works by Lucas Cranach The Elder, Raphael, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch.
“[de Chirico] viewed repetition as a way of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common… The difference? What he repeated regularly, year after year, I repeat the same day in the same painting.”
One of the key influences of Warhol’s artistic style is the media. The artist is particularly interested in the way in which images and stories are sensationalized and commodified, transforming everyday events into headline news. He recognized their ability to make or break a person’s reputation and used this idea to create his own brand of art. It was this fascination with the tabloids that led Warhol to create this body of work after de Chirico. In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited a de Chirico retrospective, inspiring Warhol to appropriate the work of this Modern Italian master, and producing his own set of After de Chirico paintings that were shown at the Campidoglio in Rome later that year. Similar to Warhol, de Chirico also had the tendency to repeat certain figures and fictions across his body of work – such as mannequins, trains, and empty cityscapes with elongated shadows. In his late years, de Chirico notoriously proceeded to replicate his own masterpieces in full. Oreste e Pilade was itself duplicated by de Chirco as Les Masques in 1973, and then by Warhol via the present work only ten years later in 1982. Both used repetition as a means to explore the relationship between art and mass production, questioning the uniqueness of the artwork in an age of mechanical reproduction. What’s more, both artists were known for their use of bright, bold colors. If Warhol’s Pop Art was characterized by its bright, eye-catching hues, de Chirico’s compositions often featured vivid shades of blue, red, and yellow which are mirrored in the present composition.
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, ORESTE E PILADE, 1962 © 2024 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / SIAE, ROME
Warhol’s artistic piracy crops de Chirico’s original painting and selectively plucks out certain elements from it, so that they become further emphasized in The Two Sisters (After de Chirico). The blues, reds, greens, and yellows that are carefully contained within the lines of de Chirico’s mannequin heads are given further vibrancy and dynamism by Warhol, who takes this colour combination and aggressively silkscreens it across the entire canvas, disobeying all lines and logic. Moreover, this painting confers a new meaning to the subject represented by de Chirico. The mannequin, a lifeless figure crafted from wood or plaster, has long captured the imagination of artists across a variety of mediums. In the realm of surrealist art, the mannequin takes on a specific significance, serving as a symbol of the uncanny, and the enigmatic. Many artists such as André Masson, Salvador Dali as well as Hans Bellmer sought to explore the boundaries between reality and the imaginary, the animate and the inanimate through their representation of the mannequin. However, in light of the Pop Art movement, the mannequin as a perfect, unblemished surface constitutes a symbol for the mechanization and dehumanization of modern society, as well as mass production. In this way, Warhol reunites the theme of the mannequin with its commercial nature.
In 1989, two years after his death, the last quarter of the Twentieth Century would come to be known as the ‘Age of Warhol’, with Robert Rosenblum claiming Warhol was not only a part of art history, but that he should be remembered as art history – a bold statement that confirms The Two Sisters (After de Chirico)’s status as an icon of art history itself. The present work is both a celebration of de Chirico’s artistic legacy and a fervent expression of Pop Art, evoking an artistic lineage between two artistic greats in the final years of the artist’s life, establishing his legacy as a titan of twentieth century image making.
Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2016
GBP 1,205,000
ANDY WARHOL
The Two Sisters (after de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50×42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)
Christie’s New-York: 9 May 2016
USD 1,805,000
ANDY WARHOL
The Two Sisters (After de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen inks on canvas
50×42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Andy Warhol 82’ (on the overlap)
Hector and Andromache (After de Chirico)
Hector and Andromache (After de Chirico) holds a poignant place in the history of twentieth-century image making. Vertical strands of acidic greens, reds and blues clash with horizontal reds and turquoises marking the mechanical linearity of Warhol’s silkscreen technique whilst evoking the primary colors of the CMYK printing technique. Instantly attributable to the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, here the image is defamiliarized through impersonal repetition, as if it has been cut from a longer string of prints, or perhaps the negative of a film.
Sotheby’s London: 10 February 2015
GBP 1,805,000
ANDY WARHOL
Hector and Andromache (After de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50 x 41.7 inches (127 x 106 cm)
Whilst de Chirico’s tableaus approach the surreal veneer of a dream, Warhol’s practice was intimately bound to a different field of latent desire: the American dream, a realm in which the hopes and fears of the wilful consumer are guided by products and the mass media. The American dream embodies a system of cultural discernment which art stands at the apex of; a hierarchy abolished by Warhol’s distanced, sarcastically neutral and non-critical reproduced visions. Warhol presents the banal and the fantastic with optic equality, vilifying the pervasive power of mass-reproduction without negating the unique power of an image. His idiosyncratically aestheticized process stands testament to a unique and enduringly influential vision, which both commented on and changed the course of art forever.
The Poet and His Muse (after de Chirico)
The Poet and His Muse (After de Chirico), 1982
Sotheby’s London: 17 September 2025
Estimated: GBP 600,000 – 800,000
GBP 571,500 / USD 780,295
ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
The Poet and His Muse (After de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50×42 inches (127 x 106.5 cm)
Stamped by the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Numbered PA 38.006 on the overlap
Conjured with an almost spectral aura, Andy Warhol’s The Poet and His Muse (After de Chirico) orchestrates a collision between the king of American Pop and Giorgio de Chirico, the metaphysical painter hailed as the father of the Surrealist metaphysical idiom. Warhol has transformed one of de Chirico’s most recognizable works, The Poet and His Muse from 1925 into a mosaic of four repeated images. The original image depicts the robed and faceless mannequins, the poet standing, the muse sitting in an empty space with sharply perspectival floorboards. De Chirico’s dream-like space is enshrouded by a dark mist that partly reveals the exterior, with a church cross in the background. Warhol’s tight cropping of the image accentuates the claustrophobia of de Chirico’s dream-like composition as the background is lost. His signature screenprinting casts beams of hazy orange and red across the canvas, as cyan, pink and white lines trace the contours with incandescent vitality. The work reveals Warhol’s fascination with Surrealist imagery and its potent imagery. Held in Pauline Karpidas’ collection since its acquisition in 1998, the work is brilliantly complemented by her collection of de Chirico’s work along with works by other Surrealist icons such as Man Ray.
The present work shown in the London home of Pauline Karpidas
In 1982, William Rubin curated a de Chirico retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that inspired Warhol to appropriate the work of the Italian master, and produce his own set of After de Chirico paintings. The series itself was commissioned by the Italian-American business Carlo Bilotti whose wife and daughter Tina and Lisa had been memorably captured by Warhol in a 1981 commission. And so many of the works were later shown at the Campidoglio in Rome between November 1982 and January 1983 before also being exhibited in New York at the Marisa del Re Gallery in 1985. Warhol and de Chirico had in fact met in 1970, and held a mutual admiration for each other’s work; the After de Chirico series was then a befitting tribute from Warhol to the metaphysical painter after his death in 1978. Similar to Warhol, de Chirico also had the tendency to repeat certain figures and fictions across his body of work, such as mannequins, trains and empty cityscapes with elongated shadows. In his late years, de Chirico notoriously proceeded to replicate his own masterpieces in full.
Andy Warhol and Giorgio de Chirico, New York, 1972, Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni © Maya Gorgoni
The Poet and His Muse was itself duplicated by de Chirico a number of times. Both artists challenged the modernist ethos of authenticity and uniqueness with their stance on replication, arguably the foundation of Warhol’s practice. The synthesis between Warhol and de Chirico is expertly described by Michael R. Taylor, ‘it was [a] reproduction in the exhibition catalogue of Carlo Ragghiati’s image from Critica d’Arte—eighteen nearly identical versions of de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses, dating from 1945 to 1962, arranged in three neat rows spread over two pages—that made the deepest impression on the younger artist. The gridlike organization recalls the modular format of Warhol’s Pop paintings of soup cans, which represent images of consumer goods arranged in stacked and ordered rows that mimic the repetitive displays in supermarket shelves (Mark R. Taylor, Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, Philadelphia 2002, p. 164). Many of de Chirico’s later works and what he called his own ‘self-copies’ after 1928 were dismissed and not included in the retrospective. Ironically it was these very works—dismissed by art historians and curators alike—that captivated Warhol’s imagination. Warhol saw strength where art history saw weakness, and with it the After de Chirico series began.
Andy Warhol in his studio © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London
Warhol’s artistic piracy crops de Chirico’s original painting and selectively plucks out certain elements from it, so that they become further emphasized in The Poet and His Muse (After de Chirico). The palette in de Chirico’s original is given further vibrancy and dynamism by Warhol, who takes the color combination and aggressively silkscreens it across the entire canvas, adding his own signature graphic and bright lines that delineate the mannequins and background. Moreover, the present work confers new meaning onto the subject represented by de Chirico. The mannequin, a lifeless figure crafted from wood or plaster, has long captured the imagination of artists across a variety of mediums. In the realm of Surrealist art, the mannequin takes on a specific significance, serving as a symbol of the uncanny and the enigmatic. Many artists such as André Masson, Salvador Dalí as well as Hans Bellmer sought to explore the boundaries between reality and the imaginary, the animate and the inanimate through their representation of the mannequin. However, in light of the Pop Art movement, the mannequin as a perfect, unblemished surface constitutes a symbol for the mechanisation and dehumanisation of modern society. In this way, Warhol reappropriates the Surrealist iconography of the mannequin, transforming it into his signature Pop aesthetic. After all, the zeitgeist of the post-modern era would be the appropriation and abstraction of the motifs and icons of the past.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Poet and his Muse, circa 1925, oil and tempera on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania © DACS 2025 / © Philadelphia Museum of Art / The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 / Bridgeman Images
For de Chirico it was his metaphysical vision—classical allusions, mannequins, trains and empty cityscapes—for Warhol, it was his nostalgic mythologizing of signs, symbols and celebrities. Warhol takes de Chirico’s metaphysical mannequins and breathes new life into their hollow forms, coating them in a synthetic glow that transforms nostalgia into prophecy. Stripping away sentiment, Warhol’s silkscreen process casts the iconic image in a ghostly haze, collapsing time between classical reverie and post-modern critique. In addition to this, the dreamscapes of de Chirico, and indeed these reinterpretations, resonate with Pauline Karpidas’ fascination with Jungian psychology and the associated theory that dreams are the conduit to the subconscious. Indeed, the present work was hung in her bedroom alongside another work from the After de Chirico series. In The Poet and His Muse (After de Chirico), Warhol amalgamates his and de Chirico’s shared artistic visions as he resurrects de Chirico’s powerful iconography and dreamscapes, ushering it into the pantheon of Pop; Warhol perhaps becomes the Poet and de Chirico the Muse, or indeed it is a reflection of Warhol’s Art from Art series, and how high culture was its muse.
The Disquieting Muses (after de Chirico)
In The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), a kaleidoscopic hybrid is born. Andy Warhol, king of American Pop art, meets Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian metaphysical painter hailed by many as the father of Surrealism. Warhol has repeated four times one of de Chirico’s most famous works, The Disquieting Muses: first painted during the First World War, it depicts a group of strangely adorned mannequins standing in deep shadow on a sharply perspectival landscape of floorboards in front of Castello Estense, in the medieval Italian city of Ferrara. The work is an icon of Modernism and a masterpiece of the melancholic, dreamlike art de Chirico pioneered in the early twentieth century. Warhol’s trademark iterative screen-printing emphasizes the columnar form of the mannequin to the left with a white vertical beam and strafes the overall composition with gorgeous swathes of color. The ground is lit with orange and the shadows glow deep red, while outlines are emphasized in luminous blue and yellow tracery; the doubled skies are suffused with scarlet or green, and rays of magenta and lilac gleam across like diagonal strobe lights. Inspired by de Chirico’s 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Warhol expresses his affinity with the older artist, whose own practice was flavored with repetition and serialization: in The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), Warhol reproduces an image that de Chirico himself had repeated countless times during his career and imbues it with a blazing Technicolor afterlife.
Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), 1982
Property from an Important Collection
Sotheby’s Ryiadh: 31 January 2026
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,016,000
The Disquieting Muses (after de Chirico) | Origins II | 2026 | Sotheby’s
REPEAT SALE
Sotheby’s Paris: 5 June 2013
Estimated: EUR 600,000 – 800,000
EUR 625,500 / USD 818,675
ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
50×42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)
Signed Andy Warhol and dated 82 (on the overlap)
Provenance
Marisa del Re Gallery, New York
Galerie Beaubourg, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
Sotheby’s Paris, 5 June 2013, lot 21 (consigned by the above)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Over the course of his prolific career, Andy Warhol profoundly reshaped how we understand the power of images, as well as the mechanisms by which they circulate, accumulate meaning, and become myth. Rising to fame in the early 1960s with his groundbreaking silkscreen technique, Warhol pioneered a mode of art that embraced mechanical reproduction as an aesthetic in its own right. His process, grounded in repetition, redefined the boundaries between high art and mass media. By the 1980s, Warhol had become not only an artistic icon but a cultural force, shaping the New York scene through ventures such as the founding of the New York Academy of Art and mentoring younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet this same decade also marked a deepening of Warhol’s engagement with art history itself. His series after Giorgio de Chirico, of which Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) from 1982 is a central and luminous example, signals a profound and deliberate homage to a predecessor whose work mirrored his own fascinations. Though Warhol and de Chirico emerged in radically different contexts, the parallels between them are striking: both fixated on repetition, both explored the theatricality of constructed images, and both cultivated a mythology of symbols that transcended their original context. In this sense, Warhol’s reinterpretation of de Chirico is not mere appropriation but a conceptual dialogue across time, medium, and ideology.
Andy Warhol in his studio with the present work.
Art © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London.
Warhol first encountered de Chirico personally in the 1970s, and their meeting sparked a fascination that would blossom into one of the most sustained art-historical engagements of his late career. De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings – populated by mannequin-like figures, elongated shadows, and classical façades – offered a vocabulary that resonated deeply with Warhol’s own visual strategies. The 1982 retrospective devoted to de Chirico at the Museum of Modern Art further cemented this interest, its extensive press coverage providing the exact kind of media saturation that inspired so many of Warhol’s subjects. Just as tabloid images of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, or electric chairs could become raw material for Warhol’s Pop idiom, so too could the revived public fascination with de Chirico ignite a new body of work. Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) emerges from this confluence of admiration, appropriation, and media stimulus.
“I always admired de Chirico. He inspired so many painters. The retrospective at the MoMA was great and showed what a great painter he was. I met him in Venice so many times and I thought I loved his work so much. I love his art and then the idea he repeated the same paintings over and over again. I like that idea a lot, so I thought it would be great to do it.”
In this monumental 1982 composition, Warhol reinterprets de Chirico’s haunting 1917 painting Le Muse Inquietanti through the lens of Pop Art’s chromatic exuberance and serial repetition. The original work, a cornerstone of the metaphysical movement, presents two mannequin-like muses situated in a desolate piazza, surrounded by classical architecture and cast shadows that evoke an atmosphere of enigmatic stillness. Warhol retains these essential motifs, such as the mannequins, the statuary, the receding architecture, but subjects them to a radical process of visual translation.
Through his silkscreen technique, Warhol multiplies the scene into a grid of repeated images, each rendered in a different palette of saturated purples, acid greens, warm oranges, and high-contrast blacks. The result is a rhythmic, almost cinematic unfolding of variations, in which de Chirico’s mysterious tableau becomes a dynamic object of visual consumption.
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, LE MUSE INQUIETANTI, 1962, oil on canvas, 94 x 63 cm
This choice of repetition is central to the dialogue between the two artists. Warhol famously deployed multiplication to question the uniqueness of the artwork in an age of mechanical reproduction, whether through his Campbell’s Soup Cans, Marilyns, or Flowers. De Chirico, although working decades earlier, similarly returned obsessively to certain motifs, as if to test the elasticity of symbolic imagery through reuse. Both artists understood repetition not as redundancy, but as a philosophical tool: for de Chirico, it underscored the dreamlike, eternal quality of metaphysical space; for Warhol, it reflected the mass-produced sameness of consumer culture. Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) collapses these aims into a single gesture, making Warhol’s mechanical repeat of de Chirico’s metaphysical repeat a layered meditation on the life of images.
Color, too, becomes a site of convergence and transformation. Warhol’s palette electrifies de Chirico’s once-muted tones, thrusting the composition into the bright, artificial register of the 1980s cultural landscape. The vivid hues of fuchsia, teal, and vermilion mirror the synthetic colors of advertising inks and magazine print, underscoring the commercial genealogy of Warhol’s silkscreen process. Yet they also echo de Chirico’s own unexpected use of bold chromatic contrasts in many of his metaphysical works. Warhol therefore amplifies rather than overwrites the Italian artist’s language, demonstrating a profound sensitivity to the emotional structure of the original while simultaneously recontextualizing it within Pop Art’s lexicon.
Andy Warhol, Colored Mona Lisa, 1963. Image © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London / Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Central to the metaphysical atmosphere of Disquieting Muses is the mannequin figure, which had captivated de Chirico for its uncanny fusion of the animate and inanimate. For the Surrealists who followed him, mannequins symbolized the subconscious, the erotic, and the mechanical body; they stood at the threshold between dream and reality. Warhol’s appropriation of the mannequin thus connects his work not only to de Chirico but to a broader tradition of twentieth-century inquiry into artificial life. Yet in Warhol’s hands, the mannequin’s meaning shifts subtly. Within the Pop Art framework, its smooth, impersonal surface becomes a symbol of the mechanized human, echoing Warhol’s own fascination with celebrities as manufactured icons. The lifeless precision of the figure speaks to the dehumanizing aspects of mass production and consumer culture, while simultaneously alluding to the mannequin’s historical role in Surrealism and metaphysical painting. Warhol thus activates multiple genealogies at once, merging art history with media critique.
Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) ultimately stands as both homage and reinvention. Warhol celebrates de Chirico’s legacy by placing his imagery into the very mechanisms that defined late-twentieth-century visual culture: seriality, saturation, commodification, and instantaneous recognizability. Yet he also asserts his own authorship, transforming metaphysical melancholy into Pop vibrancy and situating de Chirico’s symbols within the logic of the screenprint. In doing so, Warhol stages a profound conversation across time revealing the shared preoccupations of two seemingly disparate titans: the power of repetition, the allure of myth, and the capacity of images to shape collective imagination. This 1982 work is therefore not only a testament to Warhol’s technical mastery and conceptual rigor, but also a vivid affirmation of the enduring resonance of de Chirico’s vision. Together, their voices create a work that is at once historical and contemporary, enigmatic and exuberant, metaphysical and undeniably Pop.
The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), 1982
Christie’s London: 29 June 2016
Estimated: GBP 650,000 – 850,000
GBP 866,500 / USD 1,170,160
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) | Christie’s
ANDY WARHOL
The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), 1982
Acrylic and silkscreen inks on canvas
50.1 x 42.2 inches (127.3 x 107.3 cm)
Stamped three times with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts stamp
Stamped twice with the Estate of Andy Warhol stamp
Numbered PA38.001’ (on the canvas and overlap)
Provenance
Thomas Amann Fine Art AG, Zurich
Waddington Galleries, London
Carlo Bilotti Collection, Palm Beach
Waddington Galleries, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner
In The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), a kaleidoscopic hybrid is born. Andy Warhol, king of American Pop art, meets Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian metaphysical painter hailed by many as the father of Surrealism. Warhol has repeated four times one of de Chirico’s most famous works, The Disquieting Muses: first painted during the First World War, it depicts a group of strangely adorned mannequins standing in deep shadow on a sharply perspectival landscape of floorboards in front of Castello Estense, in the medieval Italian city of Ferrara. The work is an icon of Modernism and a masterpiece of the melancholic, dreamlike art de Chirico pioneered in the early twentieth century. Warhol’s trademark iterative screenprinting emphasises the columnar form of the mannequin to the left with a white vertical beam, and strafes the overall composition with gorgeous swathes of color. The ground is lit with orange and the shadows glow deep red, while outlines are emphasised in luminous blue and yellow tracery; the doubled skies are suffused with scarlet or green, and rays of magenta and lilac gleam across like diagonal strobelights. Inspired by de Chirico’s 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Warhol expresses his affinity with the older artist, whose own practice was flavoured with repetition and serialisation: in The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), Warhol reproduces an image that de Chirico himself had repeated countless times during his career, and imbues it with a blazing technicolor afterlife.
Upon seeing the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s major survey of work by de Chirico in spring 1982, Warhol was moved to create a series of screenprints, which he executed later that year. As Michael R. Taylor writes, ‘it was [a] reproduction in the exhibition catalogue of Carlo Ragghianti’s image from Critica d’Arte – eighteen nearly identical versions of de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses, dating from 1945 to 1962, arranged in three neat rows spread over two pages – that made the deepest impression on the younger artist. This gridlike organization recalls the modular format of Warhol’s Pop paintings of soup cans, which represents images of consumer goods arranged in stacked and ordered rows that mimic the repetitive displays in supermarket shelves’ (M. Taylor, Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, Philadelphia, 2002, p. 164). Like his paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy which used material that circulated in pop culture tabloids, or his treatment of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which made a media sensation when it was exhibited in New York in 1963, Warhol drew inspiration from the headliners of the day. He was also interested in the repetitive element of de Chirico’s practice, and how this was treated by the museum. As art critic Robert C. Morgan reports, a ‘disclaimer printed in the catalogue and mounted on the exhibition walls stated that works from the late period of the artist (after 1928) suffered a decline and therefore would not be included in the exhibition’ (R. Morgan, ‘A Triple Alliance: de Chirico, Picabia, Warhol,’ The Brooklyn Rail, 1 March 2004). De Chirico repainted the same compositions obsessively, some as many as a hundred times over the course of his life. It was these very works, excluded from the official history of de Chirico’s production, which inspired Warhol: where MoMA curators felt the artist’s iterative practice unworthy of attention, Warhol saw a kindred spirit.
Warhol had been introduced to de Chirico in the 1970s, and the two developed a strong friendship in the final years of the older artist’s life.
“Every time I saw de Chirico’s paintings I felt close to him. Every time I saw him I felt I had known him forever. I think he felt the same way … Once he made the remark that we both had white hair!”
Warhol, who had long been subverting the traditional values of originality, inspiration and handmade spontaneity in art, clearly appreciated the embrace of replication and parody in de Chirico’s much-maligned later work. He became fascinated by de Chirico’s process.
“How did he repeat the same images? Did he project the same image on the canvas? Maybe he did it by dividing the canvas in sections … he could have used a silkscreen!”
Inspired by this electric kinship with his precursor, in The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) Warhol fuses de Chirico’s serial practice of self-facsimile with his own, conjuring a vibrant and beautiful tribute that extends his friend’s legacy and reignites his relevance for a new age.