New Spirit (Donald Duck) Trial Proof by Andy Warhol

New Spirit (Donald Duck) Trial Proof by Andy Warhol

The New Sprit (Donald Duck)  from Andy Warhol’s Ads series. The Ads Portfolio of prints by Andy Warhol is one of his most sought after and iconic sets of prints. This Andy Warhol portfolio includes images of Judy Garland and the iconic Paramount logo . The Ads portfolio is made up of ten screen prints on Lenox Museum Board by Andy Warhol

This image of Donald Duck comes from a Disney short about wartime propaganda along with Disney humor. It encourages the public to pay their income taxes without complaining too much. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary feature in 1943 and Warhol created the print 40 years later. Like most of the images used in the Ads series, Warhol was commenting on the impact of mass media, and in this case the use of it for government gain, which was an entirely different type of marketing. In the image Donald Duck is featured in the middle, in front of a repeated Donald, giving the sense that he is on the move.

More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.

A skilled social networker, Warhol parlayed his fame, one connection at a time, to the status of a globally recognized brand. Decades before widespread reliance on portable media devices, he documented his daily activities and interactions on his traveling audio tape recorder and beloved Minox 35EL camera.  Predating the hyper-personal outlets now provided online, Warhol captured life’s every minute detail in all its messy, ordinary glamour and broadcast it through his work, to a wide and receptive audience.