Andy Warhol American, 1928–1987

Triple Elvis [Ferus type] 1963 Silver paint, spray paint, and silkscreen ink on linen 821/4 x 1181/2 in. (208.9 x 301 cm) The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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Andy Warhol’s art might be said to suffer from life, not unlike Presley himself, who was not only the same affliction as his famous subjects: its a rock-and-roll star but also a top box office ubiquity threatens to render it invisible. Warhol attraction. Like the press photo that served as exploited this paradox in many of his best-known its source, the painting removes Presley from paintings, which multiply images of celebrities any recognizable context, allowing the actor’s only to underscore the elusiveness—or, as with costume and stance, and of course his gun, to Marilyn Monroe, the tragic absence—of those identify the genre to which he belongs. If, as pictured. some have commented, Elvis filled the costume Warhol produced Triple Elvis for a fall 1963 rather unconvincingly, then surely this was part solo exhibition at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery of the image’s appeal to Warhol. (he had debuted his breakout Campbell’s Soup Warhol’s repetition of Presley across the Can paintings there the previous year). Accord- space of the canvas (and the Ferus Gallery) ing to Ferus’s director, Irving Blum, the Elvis imbues this work with a fleeting sense of paintings arrived at the gallery as an uncut roll, motion, as if it were, in fact, a moving picture. accompanied by variously sized stretcher bars. This impression is enhanced by the cropping of Warhol, who didn’t plan to arrive in L.A. until the the Elvis at left and by the overlapping of the day before the opening, asked Blum to cut and central and right-hand figures. Variable shading, stretch the canvases himself, stipulating only a byproduct of the silkscreen technique, further that the paintings be hung densely, edge-to- suggests that the Elvises are both emerging edge around the gallery. He was quickly becom- from and merging with the silver screen. Like a ing famous for such strategies of seriality and Muybridge motion study in which every frame repetition; Time magazine had recently identi- turns out to be the same, however, Triple Elvis fied him as the artist who “best plays the part ultimately underscores the rote conventionality of what a pop artist might expectably be.”1 of the Western genre, nearly six decades old The image Warhol chose for this series of by the time Flaming Star was made. For all of Elvises was a publicity photo for the 1960 Holly- Presley’s star power and sexual charisma, wood Western Flaming Star, and there is little Warhol pictures him as a mere cipher of Ameri- doubt that the silver spray-painted background can frontier mythology. is a reference to the silver screen. At just under seven feet tall, Triple Elvis’s scale is larger than Rachel Federman is assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA.

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