Andy Warhol, Knives

More than any other artist, Andy Warhol had a knack for elevating the images and objects of ordinary life into artifacts of a collective consciousness. In the early 1980s Warhol produced a series of paintings separately depicting guns, knives, and as critic Robert Rosenblum notes in his introduction, such works reflected the dark side of Warhol's mirror of America: "while creating an inventory of...superstars and supermarket favorites, (Warhol) also compiled an anthology of the American way of death, from car crashes and race riots to the electric chair itself". Seen together the knives are hunting and seductive.