Flowers (black and white) (F. & S. II.108)
Flowers (black and white) (F. & S. II.108)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
104 x 70cm, Edition of 100, Screenprint, 1974
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Meaning & Analysis
Flowers (black and white) (F. & S. II.108) is a 1974 screenprint by Andy Warhol from the Flowers (hand-coloured) series. It shows a single full-headed bloom in a tall-necked bottle, drawn in black line on cream paper. Hatched leaves and a zigzag shadow across the tabletop supply the only tone. The work is signed and published in an edition of 100.
Warhol’s flower imagery began with the hibiscus paintings of 1964, which he reduced from a photograph to flat, saturated colour. The 1974 Flowers (hand-coloured) portfolio returns to the subject in a different spirit. Its compositions are loosely drawn, printed in black and left open for the owner to colour by hand, an invitation that recalls the hand-finished botanical plate and Warhol’s own beginnings as a commercial illustrator in 1950s New York.
F. & S. II.108 is among the sparest of the group. A single rounded bloom, its spiralling petals traced in one thin line, sits above a bottle whose profile is drawn in a single confident stroke. Two leaves are filled with dense diagonal hatching. A band of zigzag shading crosses the table and the base of the bottle, giving the composition its only weight. The wavering, slightly broken quality of the line echoes the blotted-line method Warhol used in his illustration work, which keeps the screenprint close to the hand even though the process is mechanical.
Because the sheet is designed to be coloured, the uncoloured state reads as a complete image in its own right, with the drawing fully legible and the cream paper doing the work of a ground.
