Elaine Sturtevant, was a conceptual trailblazer whose radical practice questioned authorship, originality, and the mechanisms of meaning in contemporary art. Beginning in the mid-1960s, she famously recreated the works of her male peers, including Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Duchamp, not as copies, but as deliberate acts of repetition that prefigured the logic of postmodern appropriation. Study for Flowers (1964–65) is an early and powerful example, executed shortly after Warhol’s own Flowers series debuted.

Visually indistinguishable from Andy Warhol’s Flowers series, the work was created using one of Warhol’s own silkscreens, which he personally lent to Sturtevant. While she referred to her pieces as “studies,” her practice boldly challenged the art world’s foundational ideas about authorship, originality, and value.

Where Warhol used mechanical repetition to erase the artist’s hand, Sturtevant reintroduces intentionality, her act of copying becomes an act of critique. In doing so, she reveals the ways in which meaning, fame, and marketability are constructed and endlessly replicable.

Though often dismissed or misunderstood by her contemporaries, Sturtevant found an unlikely ally in Warhol himself. When asked how he made his work, Warhol famously replied, “I don’t know, ask Elaine.”

Today, Sturtevant is recognized as a pioneer of postmodern appropriation, her influence seen in artists from Sherrie Levine to Richard Prince. With exhibitions at MoMA and the Musée d’Art Moderne, and works held by major institutions including SFMOMA and the Moderna Museet, her legacy continues to strengthen. Study for Flowers stands as an early and potent example of her vision—a work that duplicates in order to disrupt, and copies in order to question what, and who, we value in art.