Portraits of the 70s
"Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?" - Andy Warhol
SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION, ONE OF ONLY 200 COPIES of Warhol’s compilation of prominent celebrities, socialites, and cultural leaders of the 1970s, including Liza Minnelli, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Yves Saint Laurent, and David Hockney.
In 1979, for the second time in a decade, the Whitney Museum of American Art had mounted a major exhibition devoted to the work of Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work this time markedly contrasted with his iconic creations of the 1960s: “there [was] this major difference: whereas the earlier work was very neat and precise in execution (the Brillo box had, after all, to look like a Brillo box), the new work [had] a very slapdash look. This, as they say, [was] no accident. In the 60's it was important for artists of the Pop school not to appear to have any affinity with Abstract Expressionism, but in the 70's — such [were] the vicissitudes of taste—it was O.K. again for paintings to look smeary and ‘unfinished’...” (New York Times).
“With Warhol’s gallery of contemporary faces, the decade of 1970s high society is instantly captured. In this glittering realm, light and shadow are bleached out by the high wattage of spotlights; colors seem selected from the likes of Baskin-Robbins; and brushstrokes offer an extravagant, upper-income virtuosity which appears to be quoting, for conspicuous consumption, a bravura tradition that extends from Hals through de Kooning” (Robert Rosenblum).
“By accepting the photograph directly into the domain of pictorial art, not as an external memory prop for the handmade re-creation of reality but as the actual base for the image on canvas, Warhol was able to grasp instantly a whole new visual and moral network of modern life that tells us not only about the way we can switch from artificial color to artificial black-and-white on our TV sets but also about the way we could switch just as quickly from a movie commercial to footage of the Vietnam war. For Warhol, the journalistic medium of photography, already a counterfeit experience of the world out there is doubly counterfeit in its translation to the realm of art” (Robert Rosenblum).
This limited edition includes a collection of 112 color illustrations and a catalogue essay by the renowned art critic Robert Rosenblum, who describes Warhol's portraits as “capturing an incredible range of psychological insights among his sitters.”
Signed in marker by Warhol on the colophon. New York: Random House, 1979. Quarto (8.5x9.5x1 inches), original cloth, original pictorial slipcase. Book with abrasions and light wear to corners of box, otherwise fine. RARE.
Note: Housed in stunning custom decorated morocco box by noted book designer Sjoerd Hofstra.
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