Wayne Gretzky #99 (F&S II.306) by Andy Warhol
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Andy Warhol
Wayne Gretzky #99 (F&S II.306)
colour screenprint on lenox museum board
signed and numbered 280/300 lower left, signed by Wayne Gretzky and inscribed "99" lower right, printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York; published by Frans Wynans, Vancouver
40 x 32 in ( 101.6 x 81.3 cm ) ( sight )
Auction Estimate: $20,000.00 - $30,000.00
Private Collection, British Columbia
Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann, "Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1987", 4th edition, Milan, 2003, reproduced page 133, catalogue no. II.306
Pat Hackett, ed., "The Andy Warhol Diaries", New York, 2014, page 515
'When Andy Warhol and Wayne Gretzky Teamed Up for a Portrait', "CBC Archives" [online publication], 12 December 2019, accessed 2 April 2025
—Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol and Wayne Gretzky were introduced by Vancouver dealer Frans Wynans. Gretzky had reportedly been a fan of the artist long before their meeting. This collaboration aligned with Warhol’s interests, as he had created the portfolio Athletes in 1977, which featured ten portraits, including Muhammad Ali, O.J. Simpson, Jack Nicklaus and Pelé.
The original paintings Warhol created from the sitting originally sold for $35,000, while the screenprints sold for $2,000. Gretzky kept one of the portraits for himself, choosing the one he described as featuring “the Oiler colours, if you can see the blue with the orange and white. They all look the same, but the colour in that one was the one that I seemed to like the most.”
Warhol’s diary entry for Thursday, June 9, 1983—the day of their appointment—describes their meeting: “Got up early because I had a 10:00 appointment at the office that Fred had made with Wayne Gretzky of the Oilers (cab $6). When I got there they said Gretzky had just called and said he was coming right down. Meanwhile Fred who had made this early, early meeting wasn’t there yet... By 12:30 I was still the only one there, and I was mad... And finally Gretzky arrived and he was adorable, blond twenty-two and cute. He doesn’t wear shoulder pads when he plays. I told him he should go into the movies and he said that he was going to be in a Fall Guy and a Tom Selleck. He dates a Canadian singer.”
In this work, Warhol focuses on “The Great One’s” boyish blond hair and intense gaze, which he emphasized using neon colours set against a large white square that contrasts with an intense blue background. Additionally, a large neon pink square highlights Gretzky’s famous number ninety-nine, with stylistic coloured outlines drawing attention to the hockey stick he holds. The last few letters of the hockey logo Titan are barely visible, a brand which Gretzky would be associated with throughout his career.
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Andy Warhol
(1928 - 1987)
Fascinated by consumer culture, fame, and the media, Andy Warhol established himself as one of the most famous and influential artists of the twentieth century. Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to working-class immigrants from present-day Slovakia, Warhol grew up with an enduring interest in celebrities and mass culture. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York City to become a successful commercial artist and illustrator. During the 1950s, his drawings were published in magazines and displayed in department stores. Yet, Warhol was developing his own style of painting at the same time, inspired by mass culture.
By the early 1960s, Warhol began producing paintings of banal consumer goods, such as soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, and movie stars, thus establishing his status as the founder of Pop art. He deliberately blurred the lines between high and low art, celebrating popular culture and consumerism unlike ever before. Warhol embraced the photomechanical silkscreen process in 1962 by producing paintings through photography, thus rejecting traditional notions of the handmade and authorship from his works. The fact that his studio was called “The Factory” only reinforced this image. By 1963, he had replaced his silkscreen process for hand painting. Working with assistants, he produced series of flowers, cows, and portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth II, Liz Taylor and Mick Jagger, among many others. In the early 1970s, he returned to painting after concentrating briefly on making films, producing monumental silkscreen images of Mao Zedong, commissioned portraits and the Hammer and Sickle series. A major retrospective of his work, organized by the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970, travelled across the United States and abroad. Warhol died in 1987 at the age of fifty-eight in New York.
