After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his native Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) moved to New York in 1952 and began his career as a commercial illustrator. Among his early works were huge enlargements of comicstrip pictures which were displayed in the store windows at Bonwit Teller's. Warhol continued to use popular culture as a source of inspiration throughout his career and is often referred to as the ''King of Pop Art." In contrast to the private, mythic world of abstract expressionism, Warhol reintroduced people and contemporary culture to art.

Portraiture was Warhol's primary theme and source of income in the last two decades of his career. In contrast to his portraits of the seventies which were of contemporary celebrities and socialites, Warhol's portraits of the eighties are often derived from works by artists of the past such as Edvard Munch, Giorgio de Chirico, and Sandra Botticelli. This image is based on the painting, Goethe in der Romischen Campagna, 1787-88, by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein in the collection of the Staedel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany. It is one of a portfolio of four prints, all identical in form but each distinguished by variations in color.

Inresurrecting this image from the eighteenth century and transforming it with vivid, often strangely-juxtaposed colors, Warhol breathes fresh life into the old master portrait tradition. In Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne , Roberta Bernstein writes that Warhol"raids the most sacred bastions of art history for images which suggest a homage to the past, and at the same time through their Pop color and poster-like style promote a position of iconoclastic irreverence." While linking his art to art of the past, Warhol places his work in the continuum of art history, yet also throws into question the notion of art as sacrosanct.

What was once a unique masterpiece painted by hand has been transformed by Warhol into a screenprint. All evidence of the traditional"artist's touch" as well as any intimacy between artist and sitter has vanished, replaced by the detached, photo-mechanical process which Warhol used to create all his portraits. The bright colors and flattening and simplifying of forms bear the marks of advertising and reveal Warhol's early experience as an illustrator. The off­ register coloring brings to mind reproductions in cheap magazines. By making multiples of the single image the artist suggests that this image is not unique and like a newspaper, or even a can of soup, can be produced for mass consumption. Warhol has wrapped this appropriated image with the bright packaging of twentieth-century design and in doing so unites both high and low art, elite and popular culture.
Allison Kemmerer