Amazon.com
If you're a fan, your bookshelf is crying out for Andy Warhol: 365 Takes. And if you're not, this artfully designed volume may very well turn you into one. Read it straight through or dip in anywhere. Either way, you get an illustrated tour of Warhol's friends, lovers, personal history and obsessions (shoes, religion, jewels, mortality), as well as his art. Organized in a vaguely thematic way that blithely ignores chronology, this compact volume serves up a four-decade feast of creativity in bite-size nuggets: a very Warholian approach. Facing pages juxtapose a Warhol image with a well-chosen morsel of text. Drawn from diverse sources, including The Andy Warhol Diaries, the texts illuminate the images with useful tidbits of insider information. Reproductions of Warhol's work reveal his extraordinary range and inventiveness, from the delicate, lyrical drawing for a jazz record cover from the 1950s to rueful self-portrait photos in drag from the early 1980s. Of course, much of the famous work is here as well—the Death and Disaster Series, the Brillo boxes, the Three Marilyns, the celebrity portraits of the 1070s, the collaborations with the Velvet Underground. One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is the way it uses Warhol's vast personal collection of ephemera to show how a newspaper headline, shop window or movie star magazine could inform the look of his art. This great compendium of Warholiana is marred only by the occasionally smug, fanzine tone of remarks by The Andy Warhol Museum staff. There’s no need to overstate the case for Warhol; his outsized reputation is secure. --Cathy Curtis
From Publishers Weekly
This "year in the life" of Warhol's artistic and social productions (was there a difference?) actually spans decades. More than 15 years after Warhol's death, his work retains an uncanny ability to make the most banal elements of American life sharp and subversive; these 365 full-page 91/2"×61/2" color illustrations, with pertinent (or impertinent), texts on facing pages) includes the movies (Blow Job, Taylor Mead's Ass), the silk screens (Mao etc.), the entourage (endless) and much more in celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Warhol museum (in Warhol's birthplace of Pittsburgh, Pa.). The Andy Warhol Diaries and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol are overdrawn on for the text. The illustrations are fresher and include early drawings; film notes and shooting schedules; photographs of Warhol's tape recorder, telephone and wig collection; and a magazine quiz filled out by Warhol. These are counterposed with reproductions of some (but not all) of Warhol's better known completed pieces, such as Campbell's Soup or Elvis 11 Times. However, the inclusion of "contextual" material like photographs of Brooke Shields or the Jacksons could have easily been replaced by more of Warhol's own artwork. While the range reproduced shows Warhol's extraordinary versatility in mediums, whether film, silkscreen, painting or people-collecting, no book can convey the shocking impact of his work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
