A Gold Book: Hand With Carnation (F. & S. IV.115)

In 1957, Warhol was working primarily as a commercial illustrator – producing shoe advertisements, record sleeves, and decorative drawings for publishers and department stores. A Gold Book was one of several deluxe artist's publications he produced during this period, hand-distributed among friends and collectors in small numbers. The carnation print exemplifies the blotted line technique he had developed from commercial practice: ink applied to one surface and transferred to another while still wet, producing a slightly broken, deliberately imperfect line with a quality of soft mechanical reproduction built into the original mark.

In this print, a lightly outlined hand enters the composition from the left – fingers long and unhurried, the gesture quiet – holding a carnation whose stem and leaves are rendered in warm gold. The pink bloom sits at the top of the image, the only colour note against the off-cream ground. There is nothing of the brash flatness Warhol would later become known for; this is careful, mannered and decorative work, closer in sensibility to his commercial illustration contemporaries than to the Factory. Its interest lies precisely in that distance. A Gold Book: Hand With Carnation records the sensibility Warhol brought to his practice before the strategies of fame and seriality reshaped it entirely.