In a striking production, Andy Warhol presents us one of the most famous German poets of all time - Goethe with the unmistakable hat, as Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein depicted him in his painting “Goethe in der Campagna” around 1786/87. Warhol removed the figure from its surrounding landscape and transferred the great poet laureate into the square form of his serigraph art. Rendered in bright colors and bordered by demonstrative contour lines, Goethe joined the array of celebrities portrayed by Warhol. In the special case of his four-part Goethe suite, the celebrated American artist succeeded in reinterpreting what was probably the best-known portrait of Goethe and translated the motif into an unmistakable statement of pop.

In this context, Warhol’s close connection with German art and the cultural scene was reinforced by both the serigraphs’ motif and the background of their creation: Andy Warhol visited Frankfurt am Main in 1980 as part of a portrait commission from the publisher Siegfried Unseld, together they visited the Städel Museum. Standing in front of Tischbein's painting, Unseld is said to have encouraged the pop artist to adopt the motif for his own work.

The suite, created in 1982, as well as the artist's entire later creative period, are particularly characterized by the close collaboration with the publishers Jörg Schellmann and Bernd Klüser. From around 1970, Schellmann would become one of the most important publishers of editions by contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring and Hanne Darboven. The year 1980 marked the beginning of the collaboration with Andy Warhol, as the artist's first serial work was published by Schellmann & Klüser with the famous portrait of Joseph Beuys. Schellmann later commented on the two artists: "The influence that art has on our way of thinking and seeing was always very interesting to me, and both Beuys and Warhol, although quite opposite, had a direct contact with people." In addition to the Goethe Suite, which is so popular and rare today, more than 20 other editions were created as part of this collaboration until Warhol's death in 1987. A collaboration that offered the pop art pioneer a platform for the distribution of his iconic serigraphs made in the sense of consumerist mass-production and in line with his motto: “Thirty are better than one.” [AM]