Andy Warhol (The Museum of Modern Art)

This book dropped instore today and retails at only £5 (yes only £5), short & concise at only 48 pages but packed none the less with good info and even better pictures.


Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pnnsylvania, in 1928. In 1945 he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he studied pictorial design. Upon graduation, in 1949, he moved to New York, and quickly achieved success as an illustrator in the advertising industry.


His early artworks, made in the late 1950's, are handpainted versions of printed advertisements and omic strips, complete with faux benday dots. After seeing paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, in 1961 Warhol abondoned this direction, turning instead to photographic silkscreen production on canvas. Between 1963 and 1968 he produced more than 60 films and numerous pantings, drawings and sculptures, all of them reflecting and reproducing aspects of popular and commercial culture and, through seriality, shifting art toward a more explicit commodity status. In particular, his use of screenprinting seemed to minimise the role of the artist's hand, definitively ushering art into the age of mass production and commodity overload.


Warhol, with his sunglasses and platimum-blond wig, beame emblamatic of the brash extravagence of 1960s New York, , and the cool deadpan glamour he embodied came to define the image of the pop artist in the public imagination. The 1970s were a quieter period in his career, which in the 1980s blossomed again into critical and financial success, partially due to his friendships with some of the younger artists dominating the New York art scene in that decade. Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987 after a routine operation. He was one of the most important American cultural figures of the late twentieth century, and the effetcs of his conceptions of art and celebrity continue to be felt.


This extract from the book leads you to the website for moma