Customer Reviews

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade

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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.

This is a wonderful book showing the artwork Andy Warhol produced in his last 10 years before his untimely death. Since most of his classic, 1960's pop art is so familiar seeing this less publicized artwork is very refreshing. Warhol created an incredible number of new series of works in these last 10 years. It's also interesting to see Warhol integrate a bigger use of hand painting and abstraction with mechanical reproduction. He also collaborated with the prominent artists of the 1980's like Haring and Basquiat to create fun mashups. And it's always interesting to see Warhol's self portraits and how they evolved in his later years. The book is well printed with excellent production values and highly recommended for long-time Andy Warhol fans.

this book is a must for all warholians. the last decade shows his last works and the detail in making them, a study in andy