Satyric Festival Song (FS.II.387, Martha Graham), 1986

"Satyric Festival Song (FS.II.387, Martha Graham)" is a screenprint on Lenox Museum Board created by Andy Warhol in 1986. From the edition of 165, the artwork is signed 'Andy Warhol' and annotated on verso. The artwork is framed in a custom closed-corner gold-leaf frame and has a framed size of 44.5 x 44.5". The artwork ships framed and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

Andy Warhol’s "Satyric Festival Song," from the 1986 "Martha Graham" portfolio, bring together two very different forms of modern image-making: Graham’s revolutionary language of movement and Warhol’s graphic vocabulary of repetition, color, and surface. Created to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, the portfolio honors Graham not as a conventional celebrity, but as an American cultural figure whose body, choreography, and public image had become inseparable.

Warhol based the series on photographs by Barbara Morgan, whose images helped define the visual memory of Graham’s performances. This source is important. Warhol was not translating dance directly, but rather working from photographs that had already frozen movement into iconic form. His screenprint process adds another layer of transformation, turning Graham’s gestures into bold, stylized images that exist between performance, photography, and Pop portraiture.

"Satyric Festival Song" has a different energy. Rather than a single suspended figure, Warhol presents Graham in doubled form, emphasizing rhythm, repetition, and performance as sequence. The dancer’s angular pose, arched body, and extended arm suggest a more primal and theatrical vocabulary. The teal, pink, and dark ground create a sharper, more contemporary mood, giving the image a graphic intensity that feels less lyrical and more experimental.

The print shows how Warhol could treat movement as image without reducing it to simple illustration. "Satyric Festival Song" emphasizes rhythm, bodily tension, and modernist edge. Both works preserve the charge of performance while acknowledging that dance, once photographed and reproduced, becomes part of a larger culture of images.

Within Warhol’s late print production, the "Martha Graham" works occupy a focused and sophisticated place. They are not the broad-market icons of celebrity or consumer culture, but they offer something more specific: a tribute to American modernism, female creative force, and the transformation of performance into lasting visual memory.