Triple Elvis [Ferus Type]

Warhol builds a machine for making myth. Across a broad silver field, three life-size impressions of the same quick‑draw cowboy cascade left-to-right: one register lands with inky authority, while the flanking figures arrive as partial strikes, their contours drifting, their blacks thinned to mist. The belt, holster, and cocked pistol read instantly as Western tropes, but Warhol treats them as reproducible signs, not personal attributes. The silver ground behaves like cinema’s silver screen, flattening depth, reflecting ambient light, and fusing painting to movie culture’s glow. The shift from crisp central impression to peripheral ghosts simulates a shutter’s flicker or a reel’s jump-cut, so motion emerges without literal movement. What looks like expressive touch is, in fact, the visible artifact of silkscreen—misregistration, ink bleed, fading pulls—elevated into meaning. The work declares that celebrity images are not merely seen; they are printed, shipped, installed, and multiplied, their power surviving even as the strikes deteriorate ¹²³⁵. That manufacturing logic is historical, not metaphorical. For the 1963 Ferus Gallery show, Warhol sent a roll of uncut, silvered canvas to Los Angeles; sections were cut and stretched to varying widths so that Elvises could line the walls edge-to-edge, engulfing viewers in a run of identical yet imperfect stars. “Ferus type” now names this corpus: black silkscreen over silver paint on linen, standardized in height, variable in width, and conceived to operate serially. In Triple Elvis [Ferus Type], the system condenses to three figures that read as successive frames collapsing into one still. The center figure’s firmly struck face, shirt seams, and weapon anchor the image’s commodity clarity; the flanking impressions drift and thin, modeling how photographs lose density in transmission yet remain legible—and desirable. Warhol thus retools American myth. The gun and swagger promise danger, but repetition domesticates menace into décor, a looped sign of masculinity that anyone can consume. The work insists that aura is not the opposite of reproduction; aura is reproduced. The more the image repeats, the more it is believed. Pop’s wager—that painting can mirror and expose the mass-media apparatus—finds a precise vehicle here, where silver evokes cinema, mechanical printing supplies the look of industry, and the Western costume telegraphs mythic Americana already coded by Hollywood publicity. The result is less a portrait than a functioning model of culture-as-circulation, showing how a figure becomes durable precisely by being endlessly copied ¹²³⁴⁵. The piece also clarifies Warhol’s own trajectory in 1963 toward silvered surfaces, screen-printed seriality, and film. The Elvis still he appropriated comes from a studio publicity image for a Western, meaning the source was already an instrument of distribution. By reprinting it at human scale, then staging uneven strikes that reveal the workings of the screen, Warhol turns exposure—the seam of the process—into the content. The cowboy’s lethal readiness doubles as media’s lethal efficiency: images draw, fire, and echo. That echo is the art. This is why institutions and markets alike have treated the Elvis series as canonical Pop: it welds medium, myth, and mechanism into a single, legible proposition about how modern icons are made and maintained. The silver field keeps the cinema in play; the serial figures keep the factory in view; the fading impressions keep the mortality of images—how they wear down and still persuade—at the surface. Triple Elvis [Ferus Type] diagnoses a culture where identity is spectacle and repetition is the engine of belief ¹²³⁶.