Warhol’s project is therefore loaded with a specific conceptual significance: his works become replicas of replicas.  

Andy Warhol’s interest in the imagery of consumerism, his mimicry of the language of advertising and his adoption of a seemingly cold, massproduced and anonymous style are what made him the most emblematic figure of Pop Art. Nevertheless, it would be an oversimplification to associate him solely with that phenomenon: through research that matured in the early 1960s and continued all the way through to the mid-1980s, he represented much more, so much so that he became a key figure representing the 20th century as a whole. First and foremost, he embodied the iconography of the contemporary artist: no longer a genius and a misfit - like Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionist generation - but a successful man, a talented manager of both himself and his Factory, able to set fashions in terms of customs and music. 

Created in 1982 and bought by Francesco Federico Cerruti at a Sotheby’s auction in 2005, The Poet and His Muse belongs to a cycle dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico and was produced during a season when, in line with new modern trends, Warhol’s research focused persistently on the history of art. After de Chirico, presented in its entirety in November of that year in Rome in the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi at the Campidoglio, consists of twelve silk-screen prints on acrylic-painted canvas. The six works that inspired the artist (Italian Square, 1950; Hector and Andromache, 1950; The Poet and his Muse, 1959, after which the Cerruti image was painted; The Disquieting Muses, 1960; Furniture in the Valley, 1962; Orestes and Pylades, 1962) all have something in common: they are all replicas of metaphysical subjects painted during de Chirico’s late years. Warhol’s project is therefore loaded with a specific conceptual significance: his works become replicas of replicas. From one canvas to the next, the treatment remains unchanged. Overlaid in flat fields that cancel out the initial colours, each subject is repeated four times. This is always done by means of silk-screen prints. The artist then went over the outlines with a grainy touch (the pencil drawing of the projected image) which, as in all Warhol’s works, is slightly out of sync with the effective profiles. 

Warhol had always admired de Chirico. He had met him on several occasions during his visits to Rome and Venice. And yet it was only in 1982 that he decided to pay tribute to him. His visit to the major retrospective organised by William Rubin at the MoMA in New York proved a decisive factor. The exhibition was limited to de Chirico’s Metaphysical phase (1910-18), but still open to the issue of the many reworkings.¹ In an interview with the curator Achille Bonito Oliva, the artist admitted to his wonderment when looking at the two pages of the catalogue featuring eighteen replicas of Le muse inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses).² In years characterised by Warhol’s continuous tributes to the classics, particularly the Italian classics (Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael), After de Chirico was not just another citation. Warhol saw the master of Metaphysics as the first artist to have knowingly thrown the idea of the originality of the artwork, even the traditionally painted one, into crisis. In short, de Chirico was his forerunner: not as regards his technique and iconography, but because of his approach to his work. 

“De Chirico repeated the same images throughout his life. I believe he did it not only because people and dealers asked him to do it, but because he liked it and viewed repetition as a way of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common […] The difference? What he repeated regularly, year after year, I repeat the same day in the same painting.”³ 

Fabio Belloni

¹ W. Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism”, in New York 1982a, pp. 73-75.

² Rome 1982-83a, p. 58.

³ Ibid., p. 56.