Exceptional Prints: Andy Warhol

Electric Chair, 1971

Andy Warhol

Electric Chair, 1971

Ten (10) screenprints on paper

Each: 35 1/2 x 48 inches (90.2 x 121.9 cm)

Edition of 250, 50 AP

A polaroid of Jed Johnson by Andy Warhol, 1973. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

David Zwirner is pleased to feature a rare complete portfolio of Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair screenprints on the occasion of our Art Basel Miami presentation. Printed in 1971, this portfolio of ten prints features the seminal image of the death chamber at Sing Sing Prison from Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series of the 1960s. This particular portfolio is distinguished for its superlative provenance. It was a gift from Warhol to the celebrated interior designer Jed Johnson (1948–1996), Warhol’s partner from 1968 to 1980. It has never before been offered for sale and remains in its original portfolio box.

Other full sets of this portfolio are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The groundbreaking Death and Disaster series, begun in 1962, was a chilling indictment of the 1960s American public’s fixation on images of death. Over the course of the decade, Warhol continued to mine newspapers and magazines for documentation of suicides, assassinations, car crashes, and electric chairs, and screened them onto both canvas and paper. The electric chair would become one of his most recognizable motifs and one he would return to in several major paintings.

Andy Warhol and Jed Johnson together in New York, 1971. Photo by Gerald Malanga

When Electric Chair was published in 1971, Warhol had been screenprinting for over a decade, employing the same technique he used on canvas to a greater experimental effect on paper. Published by renowned Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, an important early supporter of Warhol’s work and guiding force behind his market in Europe, this marked his first major print commission by a European publisher. It was also printed in Europe at Silkprint Kettner in Zurich, and was followed by numerous print commissions of a similar scale in Europe in the 1980s.

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Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971 (detail)

This work epitomizes Warhol’s critique of catastrophe as a public spectacle, the arresting collision of the subject with its intensely chromatic blues, greens, and electric pinks embodying pop art’s ability to confront mortality in bold, seductive color. Warhol contended that Electric Chair’s serial treatment of its source image was meant to “empty” it of meaning, stating that “when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.”

Andy Warhol, Red Disaster, 1963/1985. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund. © 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andy Warhol, Lavender Disaster, 1963. The Menil Collection, Houston. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster #5, 1963. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, Harry N. Abrams Family Collection, 1974. © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Warhol did more than evoke the mass subject…. He represented it in its very unrepresentability, that is, in its absence and anonymity, its disaster and death.”

—Hal Foster, Death in America

Press photograph of the death chamber at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, January 13, 1953

The source imagery for Electric Chair is a 1953 press photograph of the death chamber at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the infamous American couple convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, were executed later that same year. Warhol first screenprinted the image on canvas in 1963, the year that New York State abolished capital punishment after years of mounting opposition.

Uncropped source image for Warhol’s Electric Chair works

The Electric Chair works are unique among Warhol’s Death and Disaster series in that they do not depict violence itself. The image is framed to foreground the vacant chair, which acts as a surrogate for the human body it was designed to restrain.

Andy Warhol and Pontus Hultén with Electric Chair paintings installed in Warhol’s first major museum exhibition in Europe, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1968. Photo by Nils-Göran Hökby

Warhol began his Death and Disaster series in 1962, and early works from this series were first intended to be shown not in the US, but in Europe at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1964. Anticipating that the French intelligentsia might dismiss his first major presentation in Europe as trivial representations of consumer culture, Warhol elected to confront the violence of 1960s media culture with motifs of death destruction, and suicide.

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971 (detail)

Warhol experimented with multiple variations in the composition and color combinations during the proofing process. Certain details retain the immediacy of their production, a style that would come to define Warhol’s return to painting in the early 1970s.

“The procedural shift to an actual mechanical process—the silkscreen technique, used as one would use a brush—remains his most crucial breakthrough.”

—Donna De Salvo, curator

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971

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