ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)

"Following the trail of the Maos, in 1976 Andy did silkscreens of hammers and sickles. His fondness for communist iconography may have been partly motivated by a desire to please European collectors and critics, who tended to read Marxist meanings into his work, but he had always favored images of private identity resisting (and succumbing to) mass culture's manic replications, and he had always sought the literal's face overruling the figurative. The hammers and sickles may be symbols, but Warhol made the images from photographs of real hammers and sickles that Ronnie Cutrone had bought at a hardware store" -Wayne Koestenbaum