Warhol
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Warhol Details
From Publishers Weekly A shy, pale youth from working-class Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol became a popular commercial illustrator in 1950s New York, then a successful fine artist. With his depictions of Campbell soup cans and dollar bills, pop art broke the grip of abstract expressionism on the marketplace. Bourdon ( Pop ism: The Warhol '60s ) is especially good on these early years. This chunky, lavishly illustrated monograph also documents the trendy artistic and social whirl at Warhol's Factory and covers his avant-garde filmmaking in detail. Bourdon sees Warhol as an innovator who injected a freshness into portrait, still life and genre. He argues that Warhol's paintings of the 1970s held up a mirror to the "me" generation, while in the '80s he became a post-modernist, recycling familiar motifs in novel contexts. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal Warhol, the self-promoting "king of Pop" who pictorially chronicled American society--its faces, products, and events--may be one of this century's least understood artists. Given the recent spate of Warhol reminiscences, this biography is a good value: Words and pictures clarify his life and career, and the coffee-table format, offering over 300 reproductions that include personal photos and art--is visually satisfying. The author is an art critic who was also a colleague and long-time Warhol chum. His perspective is comprehensive, informed, and blunt without being too gossipy or sensational. The text, based on first-hand knowledge of Warhol as well as extensive interviews with his family and friends, conveys Warhol's struggle to find his own niche in the art world, his attempts to discover new forms, his role as a cult figure and mentor, and his personal idiosyncrasies.- Robin Kaplan, Los AngelesCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more
Reviews
Art critic David Bourdon's book is not a monographic study of Andy Warhol's art--it is a comprehensive survey of the artist's career aimed at a general readership. The book benefits greatly from the author's firsthand knowledge of his subject (he not only knew Warhol, but participated in the execution of several important works). Unlike the vast majority of publications on Warhol, which focus on the period 1962 - 68, Bourdon's book covers Warhol's entire career, giving equal page-time to all of the media he in which he worked. Warhol blurred the boundaries of art and business, and Bourdon follows suits by astutely including Warhol's business ventures like Interview, Andy Warhol TV and later work in print advertising among chapters on art. Bourdon is an unpretentious writer and the book is an easy read. His brief and sporadic forays into the interpretation of Warhol's work are weak, hastily summarizing idées récues reductive readings that usually end with on a non-committal note. The disappointingly large number of black and white reproductions of the works--limitations imposed, one imagines, by the publisher--diminishes the book's usefulness as a resource to critics and scholars and lessens its appeal as a coffee-table book.