La Grande Passion (F. & S. IIIB.28)

Warhol returned to branded goods throughout the 1980s, La Grande Passion sits within that late strand of product imagery. The subject is a bottle of liqueur of the same name, drawn with its script label intact, so that the object and its advertising identity arrive together, as they did in the Campbell’s and Brillo works two decades earlier.

The composition is built from three layers. At the centre, the bottle is printed in olive and lime green with a red seal at its shoulder and a fine dark outline that wanders slightly off the printed form. To the left, a second bottle appears as a flat magenta silhouette fading to orange, reading as a shadow or a double. Behind both, a passion flower is drawn in thin turquoise, violet and green line, its petals spreading across the right half of the sheet. The yellow ground is worked with a soft spray-like gradation at the edges, which gives the lithograph a looser, more painterly surface than the hard-edged screenprints of the same decade.