More than any other artist, Andy Warhol had a knack for elevating the images and objects of ordinary life into artifacts of a collective consciousness. In the early 1980s, Warhol produced a series of paintings separately depicting guns and knives. As critic Robert Rosenblum notes in his introduction, such works reflected the dark side of Warhol's mirror of America: "[...] while creating an inventory of [...] superstars and supermarket favorites, [Warhol] also compiled an anthology of the American way of death, from car crashes and race riots to the electric chair itself". Seen together, the knives are hunting and seductive.