Hammer and Sickle, 1976
Information about the artwork
- MaterialAcrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
- Dimensions305 x 407.5 x 4 cm
- Year of acquisition1998
- Inventory numberUAB 541
- On viewOn view
- Copyright© 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York., Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
More about the artwork
Andy Warhol’s idea for this largeformat silkscreen painting occurred during a trip to Italy. He saw the communist symbol of intersecting tools as graffiti on public walls—a sign of the Communist Party’s lingering presence in postWorld War II democratic Italy. After returning to the United States, where communism was seen as a threat to capitalist and Western ideals, Warhol had a hammer and sickle purchased from a local hardware shop. In the painting he brought the tools onto the canvas in red, the color associated with communism. But Warhol left the US company’s logo visible on the sickle’s handle—branding the communist symbol a capitalist product. This work belongs to the series of the same name in which Warhol reproduced the same motif in numerous photographs and paintings. His advertising background taught him that the greater the repetition of an image, the stronger its impact. But in this series, repetition drains the political charge of the communist symbol through the sheer quantity and ubiquity of its various stilllife arrangements across different mediums and formats.
