Skull (complete set)
Skull (complete set)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
76 x 102cm, Edition of 50, Screenprint, 1976
£70,000-£100,000
$130,000-$190,000 Market Value Indicator
$130,000-$190,000 Market Value Indicator
¥630,000-¥890,000 Market Value Indicator
€80,000-€120,000 Market Value Indicator
$730,000-$1,050,000 Market Value Indicator
¥14,810,000-¥21,160,000 Market Value Indicator
$90,000-$130,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Skull is a complete set of four screenprints made in 1976, part of Warhol's Skulls series. Each print depicts a human skull viewed from a low angle against bold flat colour planes – hot pink and red, peach and purple, yellow and teal, and grey and charcoal – with loose gestural hatching used to describe the bone structure. Signed and numbered from an edition of 50.
Warhol began photographing a human skull in 1976, using it as the basis for one of his most sustained engagements with mortality. The Skulls series sits within the tradition of the memento mori, but Warhol translated that tradition into the visual language of commodity and spectacle – the skull rendered as flatly as a Campbell's soup can, as frontally as a Marilyn.
The complete set of four makes the serial logic explicit. The same skull, the same low-angle viewpoint, but each colourway creates a different kind of confrontation with death. The hot pink and red version is almost celebratory, the skull dressed for a party it will never leave. The peach and purple variant is more ambivalent – muted, uncertain. The yellow and teal version restores something approaching vitality. The grey and charcoal print is the most severe: the skull dissolves into its ground, visibility barely maintained.
The loose hatching that describes the skull's surface – registering as black line across the colour planes beneath – prevents the image from resolving into pure graphic abstraction. Warhol keeps the anatomy legible. The skull remains a skull.
