Beethoven (complete set)

Warhol based the Beethoven series on a well-known nineteenth-century portrait – most likely derived from Joseph Karl Stieler's 1820 painting, which had become the standard image of the composer: dishevelled, intense, caught in the act of composition. In Warhol's hands, the portrait is reworked through the screenprint process and overlaid with scattered score fragments, the musical notation functioning simultaneously as contextual information and as graphic texture across the dense, near-black ground.

Across the four prints, the same figure – yellow-blonde hair, white cravat, pen in hand – appears in blue, grey-silver, pink and warm amber respectively, each colourway shifting the register from cold and monumental to more approachable. The musical notation printed into the backgrounds varies in intensity between prints, at times almost submerged in the ground and at others more clearly legible. The overall effect applies Warhol's serial logic – same source, multiple colour states – to an icon of canonical Western high culture rather than to consumer objects or contemporary celebrity. That this was among his final bodies of work gives it a retrospective resonance, though the prints themselves make no announcement of ending. They are, in formal terms, characteristic: methodical, chromatic and deliberately non-committal about what, if anything, the repetition is supposed to mean.