Blondie’s Lead Singer Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol to spearhead Sotheby’s forthcoming Contemporary Art Auction this June. The artist’s 1980 acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas of Debbie Harry, the renowned lead singer of the new wave and punk rock band Blondie, is estimated at £3.5-5.5 million and will be offered for sale on Wednesday, June 29, coinciding with the release of Blondie’s new album Panic of Girls. This iconic work comes from a private European collection. Collector members of the ARTKABINETT social network have her albums. Now we can bid on her art.
Commenting on this work, Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s Chairman of Contemporary Art Europe, said: “Debbie Harry is the ultimate culmination of Warhol’s exploration of our public fascination with female cultural icons.
The lasting visual power of the optically playful pink in the present work lies in the enigmatic identity of its subject, the bold directness of its surface allure, and its role as a mirror of its time. Debbie Harry truly achieved the iconic symbolic status of popular culture and the present portrait reaffirms both her place and Warhol’s place at the apex of celebrity for eternity.”
In a telephone interview with Cheyenne Westphal, Debbie Harry described how she met Andy Warhol: “We crossed paths. New York had an active street life - it was a small community back then.
You often ran into people. You knew them already or got introduced. I bumped into Andy on Broadway and 13th street and said hello and we chatted about everything. I suppose this is how we met and our friendship grew from there. I got invited to the factory and knew others that worked for Andy. I knew Brigid Polk and Andy Coltrain.”
Selected as the cover image for the major survey of Warhol’s portraiture published by Phaidon in 2005, Debbie Harry, from 1980, is one of Warhol’s most accomplished portraits of celebrity.
One of only four such portraits of the Blondie star in this rare 42 inches format, two of which are in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, this pink version has become one of the best recognised images in Warhol’s oeuvre and the definitive portrait of the 1980s style icon.
Built up of no fewer than five silkscreened layers of ink over the coloured acrylic ground, Debbie Harry sits squarely in the lineage of great portraiture that links the artist’s images of the stellar trinity of Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy in the 1960s with his final fright-wig self portraits in the 1980s.
Her fame, her beauty, and their friendship, made her an instant muse for the artist. Debbie Harry made frequent appearances on Andy Warhol’s TV show, once appearing in a day-glo camouflage head to toe outfit inspired by Warhol’s camouflage paintings which she insisted he sign while on her body.
By 1980 Warhol’s silkscreen technique had been absolutely perfected in the present work there is a wonderful balance between the crisp record of the overall form, together with softer, more subtle areas of screen that shape the shadows around her eyes, cheek and neck. Warhol’s mastery of the technique allows him to explore the various nuances available to him within the silkscreen medium in this particular work.
