Andy Warhol Sunset Portfolio (F & S II.85 - 88) For Sale

Sunset is a stunning portfolio executed in 1972 of four screenprints created by Warhol in celebration of the opening of the Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis. 632 prints were made, all of them in unique colourways, making them truly distinguished in Warhol’s printmaking career. 

Warhol was commissioned by architectural firm Johnson & Burgee to produce the prints for the hotel’s decoration; of the 632, 472 were used by the firm to display in the hotel. Sunset seems a firm departure from Warhol’s portraiture and at times garish ‘ready-made’ imagery: the image of a sunset is universal one of transience and beauty. The artist used three screens for each broad strip seen in each print: one for the background, one for the horizon, and one for the sun, triumphantly conveying the permutations of each phase. Unlike the heavily colour-contrasted in some of the artist’s other pieces, here his selections are harmonious, perfectly capturing a gradient of pinks and reds as in 11.88.  

The subject matter of sunset seems to be of sentimental importance to Warhol, as some years earlier in 1964, Warhol began working a short film, Sunset, that was never completed. He filmed sunsets in various places from San Fransisco to New York, but said: ‘I filmed so many sunsets for that project, but I never got one that satisfied me’ - a quote that appropriately encapsulates the fleeting essence of the sunset. Now illustrated in the medium of screenprint rather than film, Warhol appears to have fulfilled his task of finding the perfect sunset, and it is one that is imagined in his own colours, rather than those captured by the camera.