Douc Langur

In the 1980s, Andy Warhol embarked on several projects focused on animals, including among them his suites of Endangered Species and Vanishing Animals. Studies and screenprints of Vanishing Animals led to an eponymous book created in collaboration with German conservationist Kurt Benirschke of the San Diego Zoo. [1] The study presented here depicts one of the animals included in the Vanishing Animals suite: Douc Langur.

Warhol’s interest in endangered animals was in some ways an extension of themes Warhol had explored throughout his career. As gallerist Fergus McCaffrey posits in the catalog accompanying the 2006 exhibition Andy Warhol – Vanishing Animals: [2]

"Warhol’s concern about the death of entire species of animals fits neatly into the lexicon of untimely and unseemly ends that he repeatedly mused on during his long career. Bearing in mind the self-referential nature and frequent quotation of his own earlier work in much of the output of the 1980s, it does not take much of a leap to imagine Warhol making a connection between the suicides, car crashes, poisonings, executions, and pervasive threat of nuclear annihilation of the 1960s and the tragic plight of Vanishing Animals in the 1980s. After all, extinction is just another variety of death, and one gets the sense that Warhol was sensitized to care equally for man and beast."

The douc langur’s population has shown a notable decline in its habitat, mainly Indochina, since the 1970s. [3] The year in which this work was conceived saw the establishing of numerous additional reserves and National Parks in Vietnam, though enforcing protective measures around the douc langur has proven very difficult [4] – The World Wildlife Fund for Nature estimates that there are fewer than 700 of these primates in existence today. [5]