Gun 1969 Mnuchin @New York

Andy Wahol’s haunting “Death and Disaster” series of the early 1960s has found a place in collectors’ hearts for its lurid tabloid drama, but this painting—made two decades later—comes from a very different place. After all, Warhol had in the interim experienced firsthand the explosive power of a gun, when Valerie Solanas shot him in his studio in 1968, leaving him with a scarred body and shaken worldview. In making these stark yet oddly fetishistic paintings, Warhol invited his friends to bring their guns by his studio—which some might consider unusual considering the assassination attempt—so he could shoot them with his Polaroid camera and then monumentalize them on canvas. Chilly in aspect and made larger than life through a subtle doubling effect, this Sentinel revolver serves as an admonition of the extraordinary power of handguns (and might also serve as an uncomfortable reminder that the gallerist’s son, Steven Mnuchin, serves in the enthusiastically pro-gun Trump administration).