Andy Warhol Pete Rose (F & S II.360B) For Sale

Pete Rose is a screenprint executed in 1985 of the legendary Cincinnati Reds baseball player. It was published by the artist as a commission in anticipation of the match between Pete Rose and Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers. Rose appears in his official kit, clutching onto his bat and ready to strike: he would go onto beat Cobb in this very year. Warhol places the Reds logo directly beneath his figure, enlarging and emboldening it.  

By the mid seventies Warhol had realised the power of sports and sports personalities: ‘sports figures are to the seventies what movie stars were in the 60s’. Jumping on the bandwagon, Warhol created the Athletes series, which did exactly what he had said by creating lucid and monumental portraits of sport stars such as Muhammad Ali. As it happened, this sentiment was still evident in the 80s, seen in the likes of Pete Rose.  

The intersection of art and sport as seen in the present portrait is an important one.  Robert Weisman, the collector who commissioned Warhol to produce the Athletes series, said, ‘I thought that having Andy do the series would inspire people who loved sport to come into galleries, maybe for the first time, and people who liked art would take their first look at a sports superstar’.