In The Bottom Of My Garden 6 (F. & S. IV.90A)
In The Bottom Of My Garden 6 (F. & S. IV.90A)
Unsigned Print
Andy Warhol
36 x 26cm, Lithograph, 1956
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Meaning & Analysis
In The Bottom Of My Garden 6 (F. & S. IV.90A) is a lithograph made in 1956, produced during Warhol's early career as a commercial illustrator in New York. It depicts two cherubs with yellow curly hair and pale blue wings in an explicitly erotic arrangement, rendered in his characteristic blotted-line technique with light watercolour washes. Unsigned, and produced in small quantities for private circulation.
The In The Bottom Of My Garden series belongs to the earliest and most private phase of Warhol's career – work made before the Campbell's soup cans, before the Marilyns, before Pop Art had a name. These privately circulated lithographs were kept almost entirely out of public view during his lifetime, and represent a body of work that his posthumous reputation has had to reckon with as part of the full picture.
The technique here is the blotted-line method Warhol developed for his commercial illustration work: a loose ink line traced from an original drawing, producing a slightly broken, soft-edged contour with a naïve, almost storybook quality. Flat watercolour washes of yellow and blue are applied within the line – undemonstrative, decorative, consistent with the innocent visual register of the cherub as a motif.
That tonal innocence is the work's central strategy. The cherub – the soft-bodied, winged infant of Renaissance painting and Rococo decoration, an emblem of divine or romantic love – is one of Western art's most exhausted decorative conventions. Warhol restores it to sexuality with a lightness that makes the work feel less transgressive than candid. This is an early, direct expression of sensibilities that surface more obliquely across the rest of his career.
