Andy Warhol Neuschwanstein (F & S II.372) For Sale

Neuschwanstein is a screenprint executed by the artist in 1987, of the titular 19th Century castle in South Germany. Romantic, fantastical and fairy-tale like, Neuschwanstein is the perfect subject for the Father of Pop art to blur the lines between the real and mythological. 

Neuschwanstein castle appears at the forefront of the painting, an idyllic setting surrounded by the Alpensee lake and mountains. The castle can be seen as the height of German Romanticism: with its foundations laid in 1869, Ludwig II, King of Bavaria vowed to rebuild an old castle in ‘the authentic style of the Old German Knights’ Castles’. With its Gothic revivalist style and artistic decadence, Walt Disney was inspired by the castle on his visit to Europe and it was to famously inspire the Sleeping Beauty castle. Thus the Castle, twice over, was an object of idealisation and myth-making, a recalling of a time long forgotten. 

Warhol’s Neuschwanstein takes its image from a tourism poster for the castle. Almost unrecognisably, his painterly colouring of the setting in Wintertime gives the illusion that it might be plucked from the pages of Grimms Tales. This carefully constructed artifice is distinctively Warholian: twice reproduced and a subject of cultural heritage, the artist reminds us that commerce is at the forefront of our nostalgia.