Unique Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board

Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith, New York
Publisher: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., New York

20 July 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of first humans landing on the moon, as part of NASA’s Apollo 11 Lunar Mission. An important event of the Post-War era initially captured on camera and broadcast worldwide on 20th July 1969, has since been celebrated as the defining moment of the Twentieth Century.

Firmly established as a leading artist of the Pop art movement and an international celebrity, Warhol is best known for appropriating images from popular culture. His historic representation of Moonwalk, remains as relevant and iconic as the moon landing itself.

Completed almost two decades after the Apollo 11 mission, Andy Warhol’s Moonwalk was conceived as a result of the NASA Art Program which was created in 1961, just four years after the agency’s establishment. NASA Administrator James Webb expressed interest in creating an art program to commemorate both past and future events capturing the emotions of explorations, in a way in which history could look back and appreciate all that the agency achieved.

The Moonwalk prints were initially intended to be part of a portfolio entitled “Works on the TV” that would depict important images from the history of television in America, including “I Love Lucy”, Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The image shown by the prints however never appeared on television despite Warhol intending them to form part a television portfolio. The Moonwalk was the only composition from the series that was printed due to Warhol’s untimely death months later.

In creating his famous work, Warhol used a combination of two photographs taken by Neil Armstrong of Buzz Aldrin Junior. The first image is the photo where Buzz Aldrin salutes the US flag on the moon, landing site of Apollo 11, June 1969. The second photo shows Buzz Aldrin Junior as illustrated.

Fifty years later, as the world gets ready to celebrate this extraordinary achievement of mankind, in Moonwalk, we can only acknowledge Warhol’s genius in eternalising this remarkable feet in such a seminal depiction.