Vandalised Oil (Choppers), 2006
Oil and spray-paint on canvas
94×61 cm (37×24 inches)
Tagged (front left)
Signed and dated (on the verso)
Sotheby’s London: 2 March 2022
GBP 4,384,900
Weaponized helicopters thud into view above a peaceful Claude Lorrain-esque pastoral scene; a traditional oil painting is vandalized with passages of black and khaki spray paint; Vandalized Oil (Choppers) is a brutal and immediate painting that typifies the impact and aggression that characterizes the best of Banksy’s work. Coming from the collection of British pop icon Robbie Williams, the present work is one of the very best examples of the Vandalized Oils series, and one of only a handful to have been reproduced in Banksy’s only official monograph, Wall and Piece. In its appreciation we are reminded not only of how effective and how funny the concetto at the heart of the Vandalized Oils is, but also of Banksy’s tireless focus on various social issues, most pertinently his anti-war message.
Film still from Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Image: CBS via Getty Image
Although the present painting borrows the iconography of the Vietnam war, with the choppers appearing like something out of Apocalypse Now, in the context of mid-2000s Britain, it seems to speak more pertinently to the Iraq war. Banksy shows Western military technology spoiling a landscape. The artist had been particularly vocal in his anti-war messages during this period, and famously gave out stenciled placards at the London protests in 2003.
He had also leant on and appropriated the imagery of the Vietnam war – so shocking in its immediacy and so seared into Western visual culture – for this art: one can think particularly of the Napalm (Can’t Beat the Feeling) print, in which the girl from Nick Ut’s Pulitzer prize winning photograph is shown holding hands with Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald. The present work neatly combines these two strands of his oeuvre to create a work that is subtler in its pernicious message.
Claude Lorrain, Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, 1648
National Gallery, London
The subversive gag at the heart of the Vandalised Oils series is that these gilt-framed works might hang in a museum or esteemed private gallery and pass unnoticed to the unobservant spectator. Indeed, in the early 2000s, Banksy relished in illegally installing his own works onto walls of public museums and seeing how many hours, days, or even weeks they might last. Pictures from the present series are closely related to the Corrupted Oils for which Banksy created entirely new paintings that riffed upon the great works of art history: Monet’s Japanese Garden turned into an urban wasteland; Van Gogh’s Sunflowers turned into a wilting petrol station bouquet; Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks ruined by a football hooligan throwing a chair.
Through both of these series, via an unapologetic appropriation of its established icons and historical movements, Banksy engages a direct dialogue with art history. The vandalism of an existing oil painting takes its original cue from Marcel Duchamp, specifically his infamous 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. In this work Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee on a cheap postcard reproduction of the world’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The salacious pun of the work’s titular acronym (when pronounced these letters sounds similar to the vulgar French expression ‘there is fire down below’) and Duchamp’s masculinisation of classical female beauty poked fun at establishment ideals, particularly the Bourgeois cult of Jocondisme that was rife during the early Twentieth Century. Building on this controversial Dadaist legacy, and nodding at Roy Lichtenstein’s and Andy Warhol’s later Pop-art remixing of famous paintings, Banksy subverts the reputable. Beyond Duchamp, the Vandalised Oils take precedent from Asger Jorn’s tactic of detournement, for which a pre-existing image was subverted through the insertion of a new dissonant element. The most apposite example for Banksy’s work is Jorn’s series of ‘modification’ paintings; overpainted pictures originally bought in junk shops, many of which now reside in prestigious museum collections worldwide. With the Crude Oils, however, Banksy takes this process of artistic ‘hijacking’, applies it to high art and catapults it to the next level; in doing so, his works not only take on the history of appropriation in art, but also calls into question cultural, moral, and ethical values. As tremendously deployed in Vandalised Oil (Choppers), Banksy is a master of surprising juxtapositions; using humour and art historical acumen these works undercut the elite to elevate the proletarian and shed light on the great issues of our times.
