Pink 'Sam Sam' from 25 Cats... Hand-Coloured lithograph with signed frontispiece
By Andy Warhol
Located in Cotignac, FR
Andy Warhol limited edition hand-coloured offset lithograph of pink 'Sam Sam' mother and kitten, 1954, with in addition, rare signed frontispiece showing copy 69 of 190. (Feldman Schellmann iv. 55)
Provenance: Milt Weiner, New York, from the artist.
His sale Christies, New York, October 2013 part of lot 447.
Sims Reed Gallery, London.
Acquired from them, to present, Grosvenor Family Collection.
In the 1950s, long before he had invented himself as pop art’s pioneer, Andy Warhol was making ends meet by working as a freelance children’s book illustrator for Doubleday. Still, he was unable to escape poverty. When his mother, Julia Warhola — an artist herself and one of history’s unsung champions behind creative icons — found out about her son’s destitute conditions in 1952, she boarded a bus from Pittsburgh to New York and moved into Andy’s tiny apartment on East 75th Street, intent on taking care of him and helping him get by. The two shared a love of cats so strong that their squalid home was populated by a multitude of felines, all but one named Sam; the sole outlier, Julia’s most beloved companion, was named Hester. But in addition to cat-rearing, the mother-son cohabitation inevitably led to a series of creative collaborations and an adventure of self-publishing.
Warhol created colourful lithographs of the felines in his spare time and in 1954, Andy and Julia released a limited-edition artist’s book ungrammatically titled '25 Cats Name Sam...
Category
Mid-20th Century Pop Art Printer's Ink Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
MaterialsPaper, Printer's Ink, Watercolor
