Death and Disaster Paintings

The Death and Disaster series is a loose group of works by Andy Warhol that he produced between 1962 and 1965. The series include "Red Car Crash", "Purple Jumping Man"[1] and "Orange Disaster"[2]. The works transform personal tragedies into public spectacles, and signal the use of images of disaster in the then evolving mass media.

Warhol noted in Popism that it was Henry Geldzahler, then curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

"who gave me the idea to start the Death and Disaster series. We were both having lunch one day in the summer [of 1962] … and he laid the Daily News out on the table. The headline was '129 die in jet', and that's what started me on the death series - the Car Crashes, the Disasters, the Electric Chairs…"

http://www.artandpopularculture.com/The_Death_and_Disaster_paintings

http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/MultimediaStudentProjects/96-97/9340071p/project/html/pleb.htm