Name: Flowers (black and white) (F. & S. II.105)
Brand: Andy Warhol
Rating: 4.9 (226 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Andy Warhol’s Flowers (black and white) (F. & S. II.105) is estimated to be worth between £4,200 and £6,500. This signed screenprint, created in 1974, has shown consistent value growth since its first sale in March 2023. The hammer price over the past five years has ranged from £3,855 in August 2023 to £4,139 in November 2023. The average annual growth rate is currently 1%. This work is part of a limited edition of 100.

Auction Date

Auction House

Artwork

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

March 2023

Lama - United States

Flowers (black and white) (F. & S. II.105) - Signed Print

Meaning & Analysis

Flowers (black and white), part of the Flowers (Hand-Coloured) series (1974), is one of Andy Warhol’s more atypical prints. Reminiscent of 19th century Japanese woodblock prints, this print depicts a vase with a couple of flowers and a long, decorative leaf entirely in black and white. As with many of Warhol’s prints, form, colour and composition are flattened and simplified, but what makes this print notable is its organic and gestural use of fine lines.

Warhol consciously maintains a hand-drawn quality in the Flowers (Hand-Coloured) series that alludes to the artist’s personal touch, producing a more contemplative image that transcends the ‘machine-like’ aesthetic. His earlier Flowers series’ from 1964 and 1970 are unmistakably Pop in their brilliant, synthetic hues and erasure of the artist’s touch, however this later series is more illustrative in style, similar to the work of David Hockney and Alex Katz.

For the Flowers (Hand-Coloured) series, Warhol abandoned his photographic print technique to instead focus on line and composition. Using wallpaper samples and the book Interpretative Flower Designs by Mrs Raymond Rus Stolz as his source material, Warhol used an opaque projector to copy from these images and create the delicately rendered image. Every print in the series is unique in that they were each coloured by a studio assistant with Dr. Martin’s aniline watercolour dyes. Flowers (black and white) amalgamates the hand-drawn with the mass-produced, and originality with appropriation, in his use of the screen printing technique, hand-dying and the copied image through organically drawn lines.