Andy Warhol Cowboys and Indians Portfolio (F & S II.377-386) For Sale

Cowboys and Indians is a portfolio of ten screenprints executed by the artist in 1986, an exploration of fictional and real icons of the American West. The series was completed one year before the artist’s untimely death, and is one of the most important in his career, for its complex, as well as controversial portrayal of Native America.  

The figures in Cowboys and Indians range from the Silver Screen depictions of the Wild West (John Wayne), indigenous leaders (Geronimo, Mother & Child), artifacts (Northwest Coast Mask, Plains Indian Shield, Kachina Dolls, Indian Head Nickel) as well as American leaders (Teddy Roosevelt, General Custer). In this portfolio, Warhol creates an ultimate melting pot of stereotypes and real historical subjects. Each screenprint articulates a recognisable image in the artist’s palette: in Mother and Child, a Native American woman coloured in vivid pinks and green, in traditional clothes and jewellery, carries her son on her back. Her representation is general, rather than specific: unlike the actors in the series, she is not given a name. It can be seen then, that Mother and Child represents the Native American family unit as an archetype, devoid of tangibility. Objects in Cowboys and Indians point to Warhol’s interest in the lore of the West and its mystery: the Kachina dolls are used by the Hopi people to symbolise spirits of nature. 

Warhol’s interest in Americana is an often-overlooked personal fascination that the artist had held since childhood. Having grown up watching Westerns, the artist would as an adult, become an ardent collector of all things Western including cowboy boots, Native American rugs, tools and photographs. Indeed, the artefacts showcased in Cowboys and Indians such as the Plains Indian Shield were encountered by the artist in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. However problematised Warhol’s surface obsession with the American West may appear to the contemporary viewer, it is a real and unavoidable one that pervaded the general public: Rainer Michael Mason states that for Warhol, ‘The Indian is a conventional accessory of the American scene, for the same reason as its counterpart, the cowboy, or as Coca-Cola, the electric chair, the movie star.’  

Whilst Cowboys and Indians can be seen to commodify, and thus overlook the real identities of Native Americans and the enormity of their historical struggle, Warhol does not totally evade the the violence committed against them: General Custer, whose portrait appears authoritative in side profile (.379) fronted the campaign against a Native village of Cheyenne, slaughtering Native American leaders. In presenting this array of at first reductive Western visual memorabilia and iconography Warhol alerts the viewer that he has simply presented what American films, and culture, have deemed to be the narrative of history.