Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again

Written to accompany the first full American retrospective of Warhol since 1989, this catalogue offers a major reassessment of Warhol's life, art, and cultural significance. Rather than framing the man as a painter of soup cans and movie stars, the book shows him, as De Santo writes in the first essay, as an "ambitious, gay, Byzantine Rite Catholic son of Czechoslovak immigrants born on Pittsburgh's working-class North Side." The catalogue includes early representational paintings and advertisements, film stills, and photographs, in addition to Warhol's best-known silkscreen paintings. Rarely seen images abound, reproduced large and in color, adding to the book's delights. The imagery reflects Warhol's diverse interests, including celebrity culture, plastic surgery, dance diagrams, Polaroid photographs, Rorschach tests, and gay sex. Particularly notable are photographs of experimental sculptures titled Rain Machine (1969--70) and Mylar and Plexiglass Construction (c. 1970), which more fully integrate Warhol into the history of conceptual art. Although the book does not overemphasize sexuality, readers should be aware that nudity and eroticism appear throughout. The book is sure to become the definite overview of Warhol's creative output. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Travis Nygard, Ripon College

In this smartly illustrated retrospective, De Salvo, senior curator at the Whitney Museum, comprehensively chronicles Andy Warhol's work with a series of insightful essays from various historians, critics, and curators. The book spans Warhol's career from the early 1950s (exemplified by simple line-drawn self-portraits) to 1987 (an abstract series of Rorschach paintings), when he died following surgery. Famous works such as the Campbell's soup can series are contextualized within the broader scope of his early career as a commercial illustrator ("I've always been a commercial artist," Warhol said late in his life). The book goes beyond pop art with photos of a police confrontation in Birmingham (which inspired Warhol's Death in America paintings) as well as his recreation of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, which Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum, notes was inspired by friends of Warhol's who had died of AIDS. Fans of the Velvet Underground will enjoy, in art historian Branden W. Joseph's essay, an anecdote about an intentional skip placed on the vinyl record in the song "Loop" that mimics repetition themes found in Warhol's screen prints. This definitive collection reveals lesser-known aspects of Warhol's art while giving valuable context to his best-known works. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.