Warhol’s Dolly Parton portrait glows at Sotheby’s New York
A radiant silkscreen of country music's most luminous star, commissioned four decades ago, reveals the intersection of pop art and American legend. The work goes to auction this November.
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Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portrait of Dolly Parton radiates from a golden ground with the kind of luminous certainty the artist reserved for his most celebrated subjects. Commissioned by Parton in 1985, the work captures her in profile: turquoise eyes, carmine lips, a face rendered in Warhol’s signature palette of cream and rose against that glowing yellow that seems to vibrate with its own light. The artist’s hand appears in the simplification, the flatness, the almost sculptural quality of the simplified features.
The portrait belongs to a limited suite of works Warhol made of the country star during a pivotal summer. That season saw the artist in Los Angeles for Madonna’s wedding, moving among circles of cultural consequence where Parton’s glamour and charm registered as essential to the moment. The series emerged from that particular confluence of American stardom: a country music icon meeting the sensibility of pop art at its most crystalline and cool.
Sotheby’s brings the work to its exhibition at New York through 15 November, where it serves as a highlight of The New York Sales. The portrait will then move to The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction in partnership with Céline, where collectors and scholars of American visual culture will encounter Warhol’s vision of Parton in full context: not merely a portrait, but a meditation on fame, color and the transformation of the real into the iconic.
Free exhibition tickets are available through Sotheby’s website. The auction follows in November.
Imagery courtesy of Sotheby's (@sothebys).