Flowers (Warhol)

Four flat, brightly colored hibiscus blossoms lie scattered against a field of dark green grass, the simple shapes silkscreened and repeated. Andy Warhol took an ordinary photograph of flowers and reproduced it in his mechanical, impersonal style, the natural subject flattened into pure pattern and color. Now in the Andy Warhol Museum, Flowers is among his most popular images - decorative and cheerful on the surface, yet, like his soup cans and celebrities, quietly drained of individuality by endless reproduction, beauty turned into a mass-produced commodity that could be churned out in any color, again and again.