Andy Warhol

Anatom (Rado Watches) was executed in New York following Andy Warhol's trip to Milan in January 1987, where his Last Supper paintings were being exhibited at the Palazzo delle Stelline. It is amongst the last paintings - and the last commission - that the artist undertook before his death on 22 February of that year. Anatom (Rado Watches) is one of three paintings Warhol created to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the high-end watch brand Rado Switzerland.

The artwork selected by Rado, which was also reproduced in an edition of 500 advertising posters, remains in their collection today while the other painting is held in the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

 Anatom (Rado Watches) neatly illustrates the arc of Warhol's career in commercial art; the serial image of the watch and the bold yet balanced colours of the painting are indicative of the powerful visual brand that the artist had forged by this time. Warhol himself was a great aficionado of watches and had built a large collection of his own. A diary entry dated 13 December 1983 notes: 'Last year it was retro. If you had a thirties watch on last year it was chic. But now it's back to Corums and things. Pocket watches are out. Wristwatches are in, but they're sort of finishing. That's the second collecting trend that I started, the wristwatch one. The first was Deco'.

Andy Warhol's Silver Liz [Studio Type], created during the summer of 1963, depicts the iconic movie siren Elizabeth Taylor. With her features imprinted in black ink on a sumptuous metallic silver surface, this elegant portrait belongs to one of two series of Silver Liz paintings Warhol produced using a publicity still of the actress taken in 1960 to promote the film Butterfield 8. The work evokes her aura on the silver screen - a larger than life vision of timeless beauty.

The silver surface of Silver Liz [Studio Type] exemplifies the colour most closely associated with Warhol's work at this pivotal point of his career in the early 1960s, whilst the metallic ground also alludes to the mercurial and ethereal nature of fame. 'It was the perfect time to think silver,' the artist later recalled, 'silver was the future, it was spacy - the astronauts wore silver suits - Shepherd, Grissom, and Glenn had already been up in them, and their equipment was silver too. And silver was also the past - the Silver Screen - Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets.' Such was Warhol's love of the colour that in 1964 he decorated his 'Silver Factory' studio with sheets of aluminium foil.