To mark the fifteenth anniversary of Andy Warhol’s death, this week’s picture is one of his several morbid variations on the theme of the electric chair. Big Electric Chair, as Warhol entitled the work, was created in 1967, although the series of which it forms a part was begun four years earlier. Death by electrocution was a controversial subject in New York, where the artist lived and worked. In March and August of 1963, the last two executions by electric chair in New York State took place at Sing Sing state penitentiary. Warhol obtained a photograph of the empty execution chamber, which became the basis for a number of works, including the one reproduced here.

The original photograph that he used shows a wide-angle view of the room including doorways, a part of the ceiling and a prominent sign spelling out the word “silence” in capital letters. Those details, missing here, are visible in most of Warhol’s other electric chair pictures, which also tend to show the image multiplied. In Big Electric Chair, by contrast, the artist presents a single, close-up, large-scale image of the death chamber. The size of the picture lends it a disconcerting intimacy. Hung low on the wall, as Warhol preferred, it reads naturally enough as an extension of the space which it occupies, an area into which viewers might almost feel they could walk. But the fact that the doors have been cropped out of view in this version enhances the sense that this is also a room from which, for some, there was no escape.

It is difficult to know whether the chair is awaiting its next victim, or has just been used. The tangle of restraining straps may indicate the latter. A body has recently been removed, perhaps, and no one...

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