Andy Warhol Goethe Portfolio (F & S II.270 - 273) For Sale

Goethe is a portfolio of four screenprints published by the artist in 1982. Each print is a portrait of the  poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, famed for being one of Germany’s greatest intellectuals and prefiguring the Romantic movement. 

Warhol’s Goethe appears deep in thought, looking away from the viewer’s gaze. He is dressed in typical attire of his time period in a loose-fitting coat and wide hat. In contrast with his eighteenth-century fashion, Warhol has recoloured Goethe in blues, bright pinks, and oranges – a distinctly modern Pop Art palette. Warhol took the picture used in this portrait from one of the most famous portraits of Goethe – Goethe in the Roman Campagna by J.H.W Tischbein, which he saw during a visit to the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt. In typical Warholian irony, the artist has reconfigured not just a historical figure, but a historical painting, and made it a part of Pop Art history. 

What, aside from the encounter of Tischbein’s painting, compelled Warhol to paint Goethe, whose lofty novels and plays seem a far cry from his penchant for celebrity culture? Perhaps on a second inspection one considers that both are men of the arts of their respective time periods, both championing unbridled artistic expression. Furthermore, Warhol’s Goethe belongs to a corpus of works where he turned to historical and intellectual figures such as in Ten Portraits of Jews in the Twentieth Century (1980), where he painted German writer Franz Kafka or his portraits of Joseph Beuys (1980), pioneer of the conceptual art movement Fluxus. It seems that no icon from any era or culture could evade Warhol’s silkscreens whether they be literary giants such as Goethe or celebrities, thinkers, drag queens: all of them become democratised and equal in his canon. 

A testament to the creativity and relevance of the work’s reception in Germany, Goethe’s homeland where he is revered, Warhol’s portraits of Goethe are hung in the very Stadel Museum where he encountered Tischbein’s painting.