In 1962, as the potency of mass media reached new heights in America, Andy Warhol - already obsessively fixated on concerns of human mortality - began to silkscreen the photographs of destruction he discovered in the newspapers, marking the beginnings of his Death and Disaster series.

Drawing upon the photographs of atomic bombs, airplane crashes, car accidents and other tragedies presented as highly quotidian in the media, Warhol fearlessly probed a dark side of American society to produce a body of work that would serve as a modern allegory of the mass media age - when images of violence had dissolved into repetitive banality that most preferred not to acknowledge.

With his revolutionary mastery over the medium of silkscreen - then a primarily commercial and industrial technique - Warhol conjured the nightmare of the accidents in graphic brutality while simultaneously neutralizing their impact by way of replication. At the same time, his very technique invoked the same power of the mass media on which he was commenting, affording him a certain distance from his subject. In this painting, nineteen imprints of a car collision reel in a cinematic sequence across the canvas, in the same black and white tones of the newspapers from which Warhol drew inspiration. By 1963, forty-four percent of Americans had owned an automobile - for many, a symbol of freedom and progress and yet, at the same time, the cause of so many of the accidents reported, with increasing frequency, in the media. And yet here, Warhol transforms these tragic yet everyday events into something far greater: a powerful summation of the mystery of life and death, and an ode to the tragedy inherent in it. In its magnitude and ambition, Warhol’s Death and Disaster series today stands alongside the great history paintings - the likes of Francisco Goya’s 1808 The Third of May, Theodore Géricault’s 1819 The Raft of the Medusa, and Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Guernica - as grand painterly reportages of contemporaneous catastrophes. However, while those before him thunderously evoked the unknowable human suffering behind war massacres and shipwreck, Warhol revives such devastation in the unremarkable suburban car crash, a disaster wholly belonging to the postwar age.