Warhol

London: Studio Editions. Very Good/Very Good. 1993. Revised Edition. Hard Cover. Lge 4to 1851709061 Dust jacket complete. Black cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. Colour frontis plate. profusely illustrated with colour plates. 144 pages clean and tight. As painter, printmaker, occasional sculptor and film maker, Andy Warhol was one of the leading iconoclasts of the American Pop Art movement, along with his fellow dadaists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. During the 1950s Warhol became one of the most highly sought-after commercial illustrators in New York City, where he had rapidly reached the top of his profession after graduating from art school in his native Pittsburgh. He began painting seriously in the late 1950s, and his New York debut took the art world by storm in 1962. Over the next quarter of a century or so he created a series of images that forcefully project the strengths and weaknesses of our epoch, using the common objects of everyday life - Campbell's soup-cans, Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo boxes - and cultural icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Mao Tse-tung. By instituting parallels with cultural processes through the ways that he employed images and objects, and by drawing attention to the means by which they are created, Warhol redoubled our awareness of media hero-worship, economic exploitation, contemporary materialism, political manipulation, conspicuous consumption and the creation of artificially induced needs and aspirations. And he also threw back in our faces the contradictions and superficialities of contemporary culture and the art it has engendered, through emphasizing to the point of absurdity the complete detachment from social and artistic commitment that he saw in the world around him. At the same time he held up a mirror to our society by incorporating into his paintings and sculptures the -very techniques of mass production that are central to the modern world, while the machine-like appearance of his images exactly reflects the industrial processes that had created the objects he represented. Although much of Warhol's later work was . shallow and uneven - for around 1966 he lost confidence in the validity of art - he was always one of the most challenging, brilliant and provocative artists of our era. In Warhol he.is studied in context, warts and all. .