Statue of Liberty, 1986

Bonhams New-York: 19 November 2025
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 699,000

Bonhams : ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) Statue of Liberty 50 1/8 x 60 1/4 in (127.3 x 153 cm) (Painted in 1986)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Statue of Liberty, 1986
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas
50 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches (127.3 x 153 cm)
Stamped twice with the estate and foundation seals and inscribed ‘PA 64.010’ (on the overlap)

Painted the year before his death, Andy Warhol’s Statue of Liberty marks one of the last great declarations of the master Pop artist’s career. This synthetic polymer and acrylic painting is one in a larger series that captures a pivotal moment of renewal, turning his brush to one of the great American symbols in a swan song moment. An icon of American liberty and its vainglorious place amongst the global community, there are fewer images that conjure the American spirit as intensely as the visage of Lady Liberty. Warhol’s rendition, emerging through an energetic script of verdigris and inky black, provides us with an unfinished monument; an examination of a national-cultural symbol.

In the mid-1980s, Warhol had returned to creating entirely hand-painted canvases, a process reminiscent of his early years, while continuing a parallel practice of his signature silkscreen technique. His revived interest in a more manual approach coincided with a broader resurgence of gestural easel painting in the booming New York art scene. It was during that period that Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger initiated a high-profile collaboration between Warhol and two of the era’s rising stars, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. The partnership proved especially fruitful between Warhol and Basquiat, inspiring a refreshed painterly energy in Warhol’s solo production. The younger artist introduced him to the oil stick, prompting his embrace of expressive, hand-drawn elements, visible here in the loose handling of paint.

As a former graphic artist, Warhol immediately understood the power of a distinctive visual symbol that spoke to larger cultural mores, from the Hollywood celebrity to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper to the dollar sign. The Statue of Liberty—which fit very well in this category—was not a new subject for Warhol. He had first explored it in 1962, basing a series of prints on a postcard image of the monument. The fact that it made a return to his oeuvre in 1986 should not be surprising, considering the statue’s omnipresence in the public imagination exactly one hundred years after the statue’s arrival in New York from France as a diplomatic gift. Recently restored to celebrate its centennial, new color photographs of the statue proliferated in print magazines, newspapers, and tourist memorabilia. The incessant press coverage fit perfectly with one of the artist’s trademark fascinations. Warhol was deeply invested in the social effects of this kind of media saturation, particularly the way that the repeated mechanical reproduction of an image—of a person or a symbol—changes our understanding of that very subject as something degraded and disconnected from its original source.

One such place where Lady Liberty’s face appeared was on a commemorative tin of Fabis brand French cookies that inspired this painting’s composition. At the lower left, Warhol painted the word “Fabis” in bubble letters, and above it, the tagline “les bons biscuits” (“the good cookies”). The American and French flags that appeared behind the logo of the souvenir tin allude to the statue’s origin and remind the public of the values of freedom and democracy shared between the two nations.

The origins of this image in such a mass culture product perfectly align with the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the rampant commercialism of twentieth century capitalist society and its connection to symbolic abstractions of American moral principles. In many ways, this late work can be seen as a bookend to his career, evoking the hand-painted process and use of a brand logo that featured in his breakthrough 1962 Ferus Gallery show of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans in Los Angeles. Warhol’s choice of a greenish hue, recalling the oxidized copper of the original monument sets it apart from other versions in this series, including silkscreens in varied palettes and camouflage motifs. Other examples from this late series are held in major public collections, including The Broad in Los Angeles and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Statue of Liberty, 1986

Phillips New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,143,000

Andy Warhol – Modern & Contemporary Art … Lot 16 May 2024 | Phillips

Painted in the last year of Andy Warhol’s life, Statue of Liberty, 1986,serves as the artist’s clever meditation of one of the most recognizable symbols in the United States. The work belongs to a discrete body of paintings Warhol executed which portrays a close-up view of Lady Liberty’s resolute countenance and sharp-edged crown. The present example is notable for its pale green palette evoking the statue’s copper oxidation, a faithful rendition of this civic allegorical figure. As the decade progressed, Warhol’s imagery began to include ambiguous political and religious motifs, which have been interpreted as both earnest and critical. Depicting an iconic American emblem of opportunity and unity, this significant body of paintings have been read as a reflection of the prevailing concerns of this era, such as the burgeoning AIDS crisis and tensions of the Cold War. These nuanced responses have led this image to be celebrated as a prime exemplar of Warhol’s late career, represented by the holding of similar works from the series in major institutional collections, such as The Broad, Los Angeles.

Andy Warhol, Statue of Liberty, 1962. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Artwork: © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

The Statue of Liberty featured prominently in media coverage in 1986, making it an ideal subject for Warhol—always an astute observer of contemporary culture. That year marked the centenary of its unveiling in New York in 1886, after the monumental statute designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel, was presented as a gift as a symbolic celebration of American democracy. A century later, during the Fourth of July weekend in 1986, the United States marked this centennial anniversary with a dramatic reveal of the newly restored statue, following an expensive and ambitious two-year restoration. Amidst the media frenzy that preceded this highly-televised event, the icon of American culture saturated the publications and images of everyday life—extensively covered not only in newspapers and magazines, but also on commemorative trinkets such as keychains and coins. Warhol, intrigued by this overwhelming media exposure, culled the image of the Statue of Liberty depicted in the present work from a celebratory cookie tin lid. Even the original logo of the container is kept intact in the lower left corner of Statue of Liberty, featuring both the French and American flags and the inscription “Les bons biscuits Fabis.” Akin to his treatment of Coca-Cola and Campbell’s Soup, the present work represents the banal objects that characterize post-war consumerism, but it also takes this branding one step further to reflect how an American symbol of democracy and opportunity had become an icon of popular culture itself.

Cookie Tin produced by the French cookie company, “Les Bons Biscuits Fabis.”

In the last decade of his career, Warhol turned to his own corpus for source material. Beginning with his Retrospectives series in 1979, he returned to the very images that had solidified his position within modern art history. Warhol’s first depictions of the Statue of Liberty trace back to 1962, when he executed two paintings of the structure based on a postcard image of the New York harbor. The artist returned to the subject nearly twenty-five years later, during a period in his practice that was characterized by both introspective reflection and abundant creativity. He captured the Statue of Liberty under scaffolding for the cover of his 1985 photobook, America, before employing it in the present series of paintings and portraying it in a variety of hues. Towards the end of Warhol’s life, as his position was solidified as one of the most influential post-war artists, not even his own practice remained safe from his unceasing appropriation. In Statue of Liberty, Warhol applied his fundamental principle of reproduction to an image that had already been subject to persistent reproduction itself—on the front pages of newspapers, television, biscuit tins, and even in his own previous works. The ironically gestural, schematic approach manifest in the present work, intended to produce the appearance of brushstrokes, extends his characteristically deadpan wit. As one of the most famous structures in the world, the Statue of Liberty offered Warhol the opportunity for both self-reflection and societal reflection: probing the depths of American identity, freedom, and postmodern replication, it encapsulated the core themes that wove together Warhol’s oeuvre.

Clothed entirely in camouflage, the immediately recognizable figure of The Statue of Liberty appears against a jet-black background, existing simultaneously as figure and abstraction. As such, the present work conveys a duality that encapsulates both the artist’s early silkscreened works and his later abstractions. Like his other great Camouflage paintings, the reduced amorphous forms of army green, khaki and white that comprise the camouflage design are graphically dominant; however, here they are used not to conceal but to reveal a figure. An unparalleled icon, laden with historical, social and cultural significance, The Statue of Liberty is a fitting subject for an artist who spent much of his career preoccupied by the dynamics of fame and the iconic. Designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated on 28 October 1886, The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the people of France to the United States. The statue is of a robed figure that represents Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, and has come, over the course of its life, to stand as the definitive symbol of the fundamental values of freedom and democracy that encapsulate the American Dream.

The work, therefore, is not a representation of The Statue of Liberty but a re-presentation of an omnipresent image of the Statue that has infiltrated our collective consciousness. By using a readily available and culturally ubiquitous image, Warhol remained true to his artistic practice, which steadfastly celebrated the social forces of mass commercialization and celebrity fascination that predominated mid-century American life. As opposed to his early Statue of Liberty representations, the present work displays a single image of the Statue, shown from the waist up. Framing his composition so as to include the statue’s crown and tablet but exclude her torch and the broken chain that rests at her feet, Warhol allowed his figure to occupy nearly the whole of the six-by-six foot canvas surface, resulting in a monumental representation of this seminal American muse. Like the artist’s celebrated single screen representations of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, The Statue of Liberty elevates an already prodigiously significant figure to the status of indisputable icon.

Statue of Liberty, 1986

Sotheby’s New-York: 10 May 2011
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
USD 3,442,500

(#16) Andy Warhol

ANDY WARHOL
Statue of Liberty, 1986
Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas
72×72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)