In June of 1962, Andy Warhol met his friend Henry Geldzahler for lunch at Serendipity, one of Warhol's regular haunts. The young curator had a piece of advice for the budding Pop artist, whose work at the time dealt with Coke bottles and soup cans. "It's enough life, it's time for a little death," Geldzahler reportedly instructed Warhol. Geldzahler's push for him to move beyond consumer objects and engage with more serious subject matter led the artist to create some of the most powerful artwork of his career. 129 Die in Jet!, Warhol's 1962 remake of a New York Mirror front page, and his earliest portraits of the late Marilyn Monroe were the artist's first clashes with the theme of death. Moving into 1963, Warhol quickly advanced beyond these oblique references and was confronting fatality squarely in its grim face. He had embarked on what would later be known as the Death and Disaster series.
This loosely connected group of seventy-odd artworks take as their subjects car accidents, suicides, electric chairs, even tainted cans of tuna fish. Warhol appropriated source material from newspapers and police photo archives and used the silk screen as a means to mechanically repeat these lurid images across broad swaths of canvas. Whether Warhol intended to intensify or blunt the menacing content of these pictures via repetition is an open question.
The four largest, most significant works of the series show Warhol in full command of his talents for color and composition. With Orange Car Crash 14 Times, Black and White Disaster #4, Orange Car Crash, and Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) – a highlight of Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening sale on November 13 – Warhol took the senseless tragedies of his time, ones that expressed the fractures and failures of the American dream and presented them as history painting, in the tradition of grand, wrenching statements like Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937).
Apart from Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), which has been in the same private collection since 1988, all of the aforementioned large-scale Disaster paintings are in prestigious museum collections – owing no doubt to their importance in 20th century art. For each museum, these works serve as important cornerstones of their Pop Art holdings.