Electric Chairs,

1971

Electric Chairs are part of Warhol’s substantial Death and Disaster series, the artist’s exploration of the effects of images of violence when reproduced in the mass media or in an art context. The chair depicted here is based on a press photograph from January 13, 1953, of the death chamber at Sing Sing Prison in New York, where American citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union during World War II. Warhol first translated the newspaper image into a screenprint for a work on canvas, returning to it in a series of ten works on paper—two seen here—where he experimented with dissonant color pairings and cropped compositions to set an expressive tone.