Grapes (complete set)
Grapes (complete set)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
102 x 76cm, Edition of 50, Screenprint, 1979
£200,000-£300,000
$380,000-$570,000 Market Value Indicator
$380,000-$560,000 Market Value Indicator
¥1,800,000-¥2,690,000 Market Value Indicator
€230,000-€350,000 Market Value Indicator
$2,070,000-$3,110,000 Market Value Indicator
¥42,730,000-¥64,090,000 Market Value Indicator
$260,000-$400,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Grapes is a complete set of six screenprints made in 1979. Each print depicts a hanging cluster of grapes with vine leaves and tendrils, combining photographic screenprint imagery with flat geometric colour planes in a loose, collage-like composition. The six colourways span magenta and red, yellow-green and teal, pink and blue, grey and blue, green and red, and cyan and purple. Signed and numbered from an edition of 50.
The Grapes series of 1979 belongs to a group of still-life works – alongside Flowers, Skulls, and Cow – in which Warhol turned his serial method towards subjects with established art-historical associations. The grape, a fixture in Dutch and Flemish vanitas painting, arrives here stripped of religious significance and reconfigured through the aesthetic of the fashion spread.
Each print combines two modes of image-making: a photographic screenprint of the grape cluster, detailed and halftone-inflected, overlaid on flat geometric colour fields that read as abstracted background planes. The result is neither traditional still-life nor pure abstraction but a deliberate collision of both, the fruit floating in something closer to graphic collage than naturalistic space.
The six colourways take the subject through very different emotional territories. The magenta-and-red version is lush and saturated. The yellow-green variant has a more acid quality, the grapes almost aggressively ripe. The grey version evacuates colour almost entirely, the cluster hanging in a near-monochrome field. None of the prints ask the viewer to contemplate mortality or harvest. Warhol keeps the grapes beautiful and empty – exactly like anything else he made.
