The Factory produced a total of over 900 Flowers in all sizes. "Friends come
to the Factory and do the work with me. Sometimes there'll be as many as fifteen
people in the afternoon, filling the colors and stretching the canvases" ( Andy
Warhol, 1965). The canvases were stretched after printing on the standard-sized
stretchers supplied by the art shop, so the size of the finished picture was
determined not only by the size of the image, but also by the stretcher. As a
result, images overlapped or were truncated (as in the Elvis series) or the borders
of the canvases were left unprinted.

John Perreault, "Andy Warhol", Vogue, March 1970, pp. 65-206.

Andy Warhol's name is a household work like Ringo, Ultra Brite, or Raquel
Welch. Andy Warhol is the most famous artist in America. For millions,
Warhol is the artist personified. The ghostly complexion, the silver-white hair,
the dark glasses, and the leather jacket combine to make a memorable image,
especially in conjunction with sensational headlines: He was shot down by a man-
hating "Factory" hopeful the same week that Robert Kennedy was killed, but he
survived to expose his scars in the pages of Esquire.

Everything Warhol does is news, by accident or design. He starts a
travelling lightshow discotheque called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He
sends a fake "Andy Warhol" on a lecture tour. He eats popcorn in someone
else's film.

Some would maintain that Warhol's greatest art work is "Andy Warhol,"
created by the same perverse but partially illusionary passivity that generated the
silk-screen paintings of Pop stars and soda-pop bottles, endlessly repeated, or the
marvelous flower paintings, or the helium-filled floating silver pillows, or the cow
wallpaper -- works that are classics and that, like the major works of Roy
Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, have changed the way we look at things.

-60-