Electric Chairs, from a portfolio of ten color screenprints,

1971

In his Death and Disaster series, Warhol explored the dark side of popular culture by ruminating on the nature of death in America. The works seen here appropriate media-generated images and re-present them as mass-produced screenprints. Electric Chairs is based on a 1953 press photograph of the death chamber at Sing Sing Prison in New York. The emotionally charged subject matter—a subject of divisiveness to this day—is immediate and yet distanced through the flattening effect of the duplication process, by which the resulting images also become smudged and ultimately somewhat abstracted. In replicating ubiquitous newspaper clippings, Warhol draws attention to how the gratuitous repetition of violent imagery desensitizes the viewer to the horror of the original events.