Andy Warhol Portraits
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Andy Warhol Portraits Details
Featuring more than 300 portraits made from the early 1960s until the artist's death in 1987, Andy Warhol Portraits is the first book to provide a comprehensive view of this overlooked body of work, which includes such well-known twentieth-century icons as Jackie Kennedy, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, and Queen Elizabeth, as well as many paintings largely unknown even to avid Warhol followers. With contextualizing essays by longtime Warhol collaborator Tony Shafrazi and art critics Carter Ratcliff and Robert Rosenblum, Andy Warhol Portraits is a facebook of the amazing cast of characters that populated Warhol's fascinating, star-studded, and, at times, sordid world.
Reviews
This book is what it says on the tin: a big thick collection of full-color, full-page high quality depictions of Andy Warhol's portraits of people.After you've studied Warhol's general oeuvre--- the soupcans, Brillo pads, silver balloons and happenings--- you'll definitely want to get a big close look at the paintings which basically supported Warhol, financially, keeping him afloat after the initial 1960's brouhaha of Pop Art had passed.These are mostly sharp, dramatic paintings of the very rich, the very beautiful and the very famous, the dramatis personae who populated Warhol's circle, done in silkscreen on canvas; all the paintings have a square aspect ratio, and all feature the artist's amazing, innovative and subtly chic color palette, and his style, which appeared to be a effort mixed of seemingly slapdash paintstreaks and extremely precise halftone shadings and layout. It is well-known that Warhol had a factory of helpers-- his "Superstars"--- who did a lot of the actual silkscreen printing for him. Legend has it that all these famous images were first sourced by Andy's having taken cheap, quick, flash-lit Polaroid snapshots at parties. Andy was fascinated by the things in America which were either singularly precious, or cheaply disposable, and he mingled both aesthetics in his artwork.If you study Warhol's career, you know that many art critics have dismissed as "not real Art" just about everything the artist did after his being shot in 1968. After that fateful date, Warhol decided that portraitizing the beau-monde (movie stars, art dealers, rockstars, socialites, royalty and supermodels) and demi-monde (drag queens, drug addicts, hustlers and pornstars) of New York society was how he chose to spend the period roughly from 1968--1984. This thick PHAIDON book contains a sumptuous collection of those portraits in large format.Nowdays, digital softwares allow us to approximate the general look of the famous portraits, but if you'll closely examine the subtleties of these canvases, you'll observe that they are full of shrewd and subtle details that almost no modern Photoshop practitioner can duplicate. As John Updike has said, none of the modern knockoffs of Warhol even come close to what the artist was really doing with these silkscreens.Highly recommended. [N.B. Do note that this book does NOT contain the iconic oil-pastel celebrity covers of INTERVIEW magazine; those were done not by Warhol, but by the late Richard Bernstein. Hopefully, we'll get a nice big book of his portraits someday!]
