Andy Warhol Prints.

WARHOL, Andy.

Item Number: 144910

New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc, 1985.

First edition of this definitive catalogue of Warhol’s prints, spanning his entire career. Quarto, original cloth, with over 390 illustrations of Warhol’s prints, including 344 in color. Boldly signed twice by Andy Warhol on both the front panel of the dust jacket and front free endpaper. Edited by Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann. Essays by Henry Geldzahler and Roberta Bernstein. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Cover: Details of Renaissance Paintings (Birth of Venus), silkscreen, 1984.

"Buying," said Andy Warhol, "is more American than thinking and I'm as American as they come." For more than twenty years Warhol watched what was 'bought and sold' in America, from objects (Campbell's Soup) to ideas (Electric Chair) to glamorous celebrities (Mick Jagger). He watched and then transformed what he saw into incisive images that summed up contemporary society with uncanny accuracy. The graphic works illustrated in this book represent every edition of prints that Warhol published, and they provide not only a history of Warhol's printmaking since 1962 but a lively visual chronicle of the culture as well. Every print is accompanied by thorough documentation, and 409 of them are painstakingly reproduced in high quality color of the most precise fidelity. An insightful introduction by the always perceptive Henry Geldzahler reminisces about Warhol's long career and unique vision, while placing his graphic work in the larger context of the artist's life and times. Roberta Bernstein's enlightening essay concentrates on the prints themselves, explaining how they evolved in subject and style and how they relate to Warhol's other work. Rupert Jasen Smith's informative interview recalls his stimulating experiences as Andy Warhol's printer from 1977 to 1987. There is an extraordinary variety of images here, but there is also a surprising continuity of themes, from the earliest print in the book, the modest black and white etching of an advertisement called Cooking Pot, to Warhol's final series of vividly colored Camouflage prints. Some of the works are rarities that have just been rediscovered; others are the classics that helped make Warhol famous. Seen all together, they achieve a kind of critical mass that makes strikingly apparent what an astonishingly skilled and inventive graphic artist Andy Warhol was.