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Joe Sample

Prof. Smart

ENC 1101

31 July 2016

A Stubborn Blend in Andy Warhol’s Statue of Liberty

Andy Warhol created his painting Statue of Liberty in 1962 using silkscreen ink and spray

paint on linen. Just as the title suggests, the painting’s subject is the Statue of Liberty, repeated

in a pattern twelve times (not including the right side of the painting where the image repeats

four additional times but is cut off). The painting belongs to the Andy Warhol Museum in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a whole, Warhol’s Statue of Liberty depicts a grid of several smaller

images of Lady Liberty decentered on the canvas, features a fading effect of blue and red spray

paint padded by an inordinate amount of white negative space, and represents America’s Pop

Art movement so closely tied to the artist’s name.

To briefly describe Warhol’s Statue of Liberty, it is perhaps best to begin with the twelve

repeating images that appear in a grid form and consist of

the full monument of the Statue of Liberty facing out with

her left arm bent, holding a tablet (see Fig. 1). Lady Liberty

raises her right arm skyward with a torch emerging from her

hand, although this light is not completely visible in all twelve

images. While the monument appears in the foreground of

each of the twelve images, the bay and horizon serve as a

backdrop to the statue. The horizon is colored in bluish gray

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in the bottommost nine of the twelve images and in red in the topmost three. The artist

uniquely positions all twelve images to the right side of the canvas, leaving about a third of the

work with nothing but white space. Overall, the creation takes the already well-recognized

Statue of Liberty and updates its design for a new generation.

In analyzing the work, lines, shapes, colors, and space combine with and separate from

one another to create Warhol’s distinctive design. Probably the most prominent feature of the

work is the gridlines forming twelve full rectangles and four partial ones. Additionally, with the

work repeating the same image throughout, Lady Liberty standing in the foreground of a solidly

colored Upper New York Bay creates twelve squares, each capped by a seemingly spray-

painted, circle-like shroud. The blue-gray spray paint dominates three-quarters of the images

of the Statue of Liberty, and this coloring practically spatters on most, if not all, of Lady Liberty

in the second row of the grid (the first row in blue-gray), but the paint covers less of the statue

as viewers move their eyes down the canvas, demonstrating the artist’s use of an uneven

fading effect in its design. The space Warhol uses also controls the content of the work, most

centrally through the use of negative space in the left third of the canvas, which features a

completely unused field of white. Moreover, the white background peers through the gridlines,

creating a detached effect among each of the images of the Statue of Liberty, as if each is a

flashbulb moment. Altogether, geometry, color and positioning stubbornly blend together into

an unforgettable work that stands as a symbol of the time in which it was created.

Speaking of the artwork’s date of origination, one can easily classify Warhol’s Statue of

Liberty within the American Pop Art movement of the 1960s, an artistic “response to the

brooding intellectual and emotional aspects of abstract expressionism” (Gyure 186). Known for

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creating “tension between high art and popular culture” (Gyure 186), Warhol’s work, put into

context, contrasts a classically styled sculpture with a contemporary spray-painted design. As

with practically any work of art, Warhol’s Statue of Liberty stands to make a statement about

culture itself, and while such a message may not be immediately understood, it helps to turn to

another one of Warhol’s works of art from the same year, 1962, for a bit of revelation. The

Marilyn Diptych, similar to Statue of Liberty, repeats the image of the late actress in row after

row, using the same fading effect. As Gyure points out, this repetition “exemplified

Hollywood's commodification of the individual” (186). Likewise, then, Statue of Liberty seems to

deliver the same message as The Marilyn Diptych, but in this case it is not a Hollywood star who

has been commodified; it is freedom, liberty, and America itself that can be bought and sold.

Certainly, this message is a powerful one and perhaps works as Warhol’s countercultural

observation of America in the 1960s and its presence in places, such as Vietnam, where liberty

and democracy were to be delivered and consumed, regardless of the price. Seemingly, even

more so, however, Statue of Liberty speaks to how freedom and the red, white, and blue are

used to sell products and ideas of all kinds in America, and just as the spray-paint that spatters

on Lady Liberty in each image, this commodification obscures the nation’s real freedom and

numbs America’s senses and affections for an independence it should not take for granted.

Although seemingly simple in design, Warhol’s Statue of Liberty becomes deeply

meaningful on closer look. The grid-like nature and repetition of the same image of the Statue

of Liberty monument in four rows of three defines the work’s uniqueness. The linearity,

coupled with splattered color patterns and the content’s largely off-centered positioning,

speaks to the artist’s affinity for juxtaposing artistic elements against each other. Moreover,

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the context of Statue of Liberty represents the Pop Art movement in America that drew

attention to the over-commodification of not only household products but also big ideas.

Although created in a generation known for civil rights activism, Flower Power, and recreational

drugs, such presentation and representation in Warhol’s Statue of Liberty has just as much to

say today, as it did then, and assuredly, it will speak to generations in the future.

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Works Cited

Gyure, Dale Allen. "Pop Art." St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Ed. Thomas Riggs. 2nd

ed. Vol. 4. Detroit: St. James Press, 2013. 186-187. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web.

31 July 2016.

Warhol, Andy. Statue of Liberty. 1962. Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. ArtStor. Web. 31 July

2016.

*Some content in the first paragraph is borrowed from a sample essay at University of Arkansas, Little Rock’s Department of Art.