Andy Warhol: The Last Decade
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Andy Warhol: The Last Decade Details
From the Inside Flap In the last decade before his death in 1987, Warhol continued to produce mesmerizing works at an astounding pace. Influenced by the most prominent artists of the 1980s, including Basquiat, Haring, Schnabel, and Clemente, Warhol experimented with a combination of painting and screen printing to develop an extraordinary vocabulary of images that traversed a variety of genres. The result is a remarkable output, collected here in this companion to a touring exhibition organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum. Read more
Reviews
It has become fashionable to reassess the late phases of great artists (Picasso in june 2009 in an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC, Renoir in Paris in late 2009, are just two recent examples). This book, the catalogue for the current exhibition held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which will later travel to Fort Worth, Brooklyn and Baltimore, follows this trend, with beautiful and often large-scale illustrations of the various series Warhol painted between 1977 and 1987: the so-called "Oxydation" paintings (made by urinating on the surface of the painting), the "Shadows" series, the "Retrospective" series (grouping several pop images from the early sixties on one single work), the Reversal series (negatives of polaroid shots), the lesser-known but highly innovative "Yarn" and "Rorschach" series, the Camouflage series and the Last Supper series (in which the artist revisits the history of painting by alluding to Leonardo's famous fresco in Milan). Also studied are Warhol's various collaborations with contemporaries such as Basquiat or Francesco Clemente, and his famous haunting late self-portraits (the so-called "fright-wig self-portraits").The accompanying essays are quite interesting insofar as they shed new light on a huge and rather unknown body of works that show the artist flirting for the first time with abstraction (as in the Camouflage paintings and the Shadow paintings, studied here by Julian Schnabel in the reprint of a 1989 essay that stresses Warhol's painterly accomplishment as opposed to his fame as an image maker). There is also an exciting account of the making of the "Collaboration" series, seen from the point of view of an art dealer, by Bruno Bischofberger (the Swiss dealer who initiated Warhol's collaborations with Basquiat and Clemente).Apart from the high quality of the illustrations, the main asset of this book is that it succeeds in reappraising Warhol's importance as a painter, and not only as an image maker or a manipulator of ideas. A hundred years from now, maybe it will be what Andy Warhol will be remembered for and this is why this book breaks new ground and should figure in any good contemporary arts library.