Flowers paintings

Flowers paintings occupy an uneasy place between familiar image and contested object in Andy Warhol’s diary. Their return to the studio in 1980 recalls their making in 1964, but their circulation also exposes them to disputed authenticity, falling prices, commissions, and damage in transit. The series is at once a recognizable body of work and a set of paintings whose value depends on trust in who made them and what condition they arrive in.

Authenticity and the Market

On May 6, 1978, Warhol recorded that Arman had called to say he had sold eight fake Flower paintings, claiming that he had not known they were fakes. Warhol rejected that explanation. He reasoned that Arman must have known because the paintings had been hidden away for years, and suggested that they might have been bought cheaply from Terry Ork or Soren Agenoux. The diary records Warhol’s accusation and suspicion, not an independently established account of how the works were made or acquired.

The consequences, as Warhol described them, extended beyond the eight paintings. He said the fakes had damaged the market for his work: prices had fallen, and prospective buyers were afraid they might purchase forgeries. The dispute therefore affected both the status of particular objects and confidence in Flowers paintings as a category. Their familiar appearance did not protect them; it made the question of authentication consequential for buyers and for Warhol’s standing in the market.

Warhol also noted that Gerard Malanga continued to deny having made the fakes. That denial left the question of responsibility unresolved in the diary. The contrast between Arman’s reported claim that he had unknowingly sold them and Gerard Malanga’s insistence that he had not made them gives the episode no settled explanation, while the reported decline in prices supplies a concrete result of the uncertainty.

Refusing to Sign, Returning to Paint

On June 11, 1978, as Flower paintings were being brought to his office by Rupert Smith, Warhol decided not to sign the fake ones appearing across Europe—the ones people told him they had bought from Gerard Malanga. His refusal made his signature a practical boundary between works he would authenticate and works he regarded as false. Yet the decision was not presented as simple closure: he wondered whether he should make new paintings to make good on the fakes in Europe, then left the question undecided.

That uncertainty links the dispute over existing works to the possibility of producing replacements. A signature could not, on its own, resolve the buyers’ losses or establish what had happened to the paintings, and making new ones was only a possibility in the entry. The diary preserves the hesitation rather than supplying a remedy. The Flowers paintings were thus implicated in an unresolved obligation as well as in a question of authorship.

On July 5, 1980, Warhol was painting Flowers again, this time as a commission. The heat was sweltering, and it brought back a flashback to the summer of 1964: the same Flowers, the same heat, and the same mood as when he first made them. This was a personal comparison prompted by the working conditions, not a description of how Rupert Smith experienced the paintings. When Warhol asked Rupert Smith what it felt like to watch him paint those famous images from the sixties, Rupert Smith said that it did not feel like anything. Warhol, by contrast, felt the return of the earlier summer.

The new work was not simply a replay. Warhol said he would do something different with the commissioned paintings and considered adding diamond dust. The entry does not confirm that he ultimately made that change to these particular works. Instead, it records the idea as an open possibility alongside the vivid recurrence of the original motif: the image is familiar, but the circumstances and proposed treatment can change.

Surface, Delivery, and Vulnerability

A few weeks later, on July 30, Mr. Stern called to say he was coming to look at his Flower paintings. Warhol described them as fluorescent and made with diamond dust. This detail gives the proposed alteration in July a concrete counterpart in the later diary entry, while the wording does not establish whether these were the same commission. The paintings are presented not just as images to be viewed but as works with a distinctive surface and a specific prospective viewer.

On August 11, Mr. Stern called again: the Flower paintings had arrived dented at Hartz Mountain in New Jersey, and Robyn called to find out what had happened. The delivery transformed a dispute about false authorship into a different kind of vulnerability. Here the problem was physical damage to paintings in transit, not uncertainty about who made them. The diary gives no account of the dents’ repair or their final effect on the works, so the damage remains unresolved in the record.

The next detail is Warhol’s working around the heat: he worked on paintings and paid bills in the air-conditioned front area because the back was too hot. This practical circumstance echoes the oppressive weather that had made painting Flowers in 1980 recall 1964. Across these entries, heat accompanies both the return to painting and the adjustments required to keep working; meanwhile, authenticity disputes, commissions, a contemplated diamond-dust surface, and a dented delivery show the series moving through artistic memory and ordinary business pressures. Its continued presence in the diary does not settle those pressures. It makes visible how the same recognizable Flowers could carry the weight of a past summer, a buyer’s expectations, a market damaged by fakes, and the risks of physical circulation.