3. Andy Warhol – Double Elvis 1963
In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol turned his hand to celebrities as an artistic subject matter. The artist produced several life-sized portraits of Elvis Presley, America’s most famous rock and roll singer and sex symbol throughout the 1950s. By 1963, when this painting was made, Elvis – whose hip-shaking moves had scandalised a nation only a decade before – was being overshadowed by a new generation of performers, and his career was on the decline. In ‘Double Elvis’, Warhol created a strobe effect by overlapping two images of the singer, most likely sourced from a publicity still for the Western film ‘Flaming Star’ (1960). ‘Double Elvis’ originally belonged to a long, continuous canvas of Elvises that was later cut and re-stretched into multiple paintings. The artist’s interest in film might explain why he created Elvis in double – the singer/actor appears to be moving back and forth, as if in a film strip in this silvery monochromatic work by the Pop Art legend.