Behind her, the twisted body of her male companion lies motionless, and to the left the anonymous hand of another victim hangs from the car’s dark interior. In the center of the picture a female passenger lies in a pool of blood, her vacant gaze staring out at the viewer as if in a cry for help.
The upturned vehicle, flipped over on a country road, entombs three of its victims inside its metal structure. The image Warhol used pulls no punches in its gruesome depiction of the scene of an accident. With its intense color and shocking imagery, Five Deaths on Orange becomes an authoritative essay on the power of the image in modern society. Once owned by the legendary gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, this painting has remained in the same private collection for the past thirty years, and despite half a century passing since its creation, the haunting nature of this single image has not relinquished any of its impact, and in today’s media saturated world still has the power to induce a powerful visceral reaction in those who see it.
These are timeless attributes that have been celebrated throughout art history, yet through Warhol’s eyes they appear with the potency and significance that is unparalleled within modern painting.
Encapsulated in this canvas is Warhol’s entire philosophy of art and life-a celebration of beauty, violence, modernity and the ever present Spector of death. One of Andy Warhol’s most celebrated Death and Disaster paintings, Five Deaths on Orange shows the bloody aftermath of a fatal automobile accident, containing within its forthrightness the power and prurience of Warhol’s use of imagery.
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