Ten Portraits Of Jews Of The Twentieth Century (complete set)
Ten Portraits Of Jews Of The Twentieth Century (complete set)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
100 x 80cm, Edition of 200, Screenprint, 1980
£520,000-£780,000
$990,000-$1,490,000 Market Value Indicator
$980,000-$1,470,000 Market Value Indicator
¥4,650,000-¥6,970,000 Market Value Indicator
€620,000-€930,000 Market Value Indicator
$5,460,000-$8,190,000 Market Value Indicator
¥110,080,000-¥165,110,000 Market Value Indicator
$700,000-$1,040,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Ten Portraits Of Jews Of The Twentieth Century is a complete set of ten screenprints made in 1980. Each print depicts a significant Jewish figure – among them Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, the Marx Brothers, Sarah Bernhardt, Golda Meir, and Sigmund Freud – rendered in a distinct visual approach. Signed and numbered from an edition of 200.
The Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century series was produced in 1980, originating from a proposal by gallerist Ronald Feldman. The selection of subjects – intellectuals, artists, politicians, performers – is itself an implicit argument: these are figures who shaped the century, each of whose Jewishness existed in complex relation to their public roles. Warhol neither emphasised nor suppressed that dimension; he assembled the portraits and applied his method.
What makes the set visually arresting is how markedly each print's approach is tailored to its subject. The Kafka portrait sits against a deep black ground, the young face emerging with a biographical darkness. The Einstein portrait uses a photographic screenprint base overlaid with linear drawing, the two registers slightly misaligned – a formal echo of the relativity he theorised. The Marx Brothers dissolves into a field of overlapping small figures, carnivalesque and irresolvable. Golda Meir is rendered in deep rose tones with gestural mark-making that gives the portrait an unexpected intimacy.
The series functions as a group portrait of a particular strain of intellectual and creative contribution – and as a demonstration that Warhol's serial method, so often associated with the interchangeability of mass-produced imagery, is equally capable of attending to individual distinction.
