Phaidon will publish the latest edition of its acclaimed Andy Warhol Catalogue Rasionné in July. At 804 pages,The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 6: Paintings and Sculptures mid-1977–1980 will comprise two slipcased books that document 741 paintings and sculptures produced by Warhol during the last two-and-a-half years of the 1970s.
This stunning, lavishly illustrated tome traces an enormously inventive and productive period of Warhol’s career. It includes the entirety of Warhol’s famous and enigmatic Shadows series, an epic project comprising 273 paintings, which are reproduced together here for the first time. According to Neil Printz, the catalogue’s editor, “The Shadow paintings offer the key to Warhol’s artistic concerns at the end of the 1970s—his radical rethinking of the photographic basis of his art through reversal and abstraction, and his fascination with painting as an immersive field.”
The volume opens with the series’ first phase, which includes the paintings commissioned and exhibited in early 1979 at the Lone Star Foundation in Lower Manhattan and closes with the latter phase of this seminal cycle: the diamond dust Shadows from 1979-80, made by scattering ground glass over the inked impression of the shadow.
Exhibition view, Andy Warhol: Shadows, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., September 25, 2011–January 15, 2012. Image courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
The book also records Warhol’s Retrospective and Reversal series, which revisit images from ten celebrated series of the 1960s and early 1970s, including Marilyn, Mona Lisa, Flowers, Electric Chairs, photobooth Self-Portraits, and Mao. They are assembled in montaged compositions in the Retrospectives and reimagined as negative images in the Reversal series. Volume 6 continues the Catalogue Raisonné’s detailed study of Warhol’s portrait practice.
In 1978 and 1979, he photographed nearly 50 sitters with his Polaroid Big Shot camera, including Truman Capote and Liza Minnelli, and painted nearly 200 portrait canvases. Volume 6 also explores Warhol’s fascination with Studio 54 and his first series of dedicated gift paintings; and documents his Human Heart paintings, which were produced in tandem with an unrealized mural commission, along with a group of stencilled hearts distributed as gifts. This volume introduces Warhol’s use of diamond dust in his Gem paintings, and his experimentation with silkscreen ink that fluoresces under ultraviolet light; as well as unique projects such as his hand-painted BMW Art Car.
Andy Warhol painting BMW M1, Hebertshausen, May 17, 1979. Colour photograph. Photo by Jean-Marie Bottequin, courtesy BMW Group Classic
The editors of the Catalogue Raisonné and a team of trained researchers have scoured the secondary literature, examined thousands of works of art, reviewed the artist’s archives and diary entries, and interviewed assistants, colleagues, portrait sitters, and friends to elucidate Warhol’s materials, techniques, and artistic process. The paintings and sculptures reproduced in this publication are accompanied by over 700 images of source materials, the artist’s Polaroids, contact sheets, working acetates, and archival photographs of gallery and museum installations, as well as related works.
Andy Warhol painting Shadows with a sponge mop, 860 Broadway, December 31, 1978. Reproduction from 35mm negative. Image © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
When Phaidon published Volume 1 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné in 2002, it entered uncharted territory, launching an ambitious, ongoing collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to create the definitive record of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Over the course of his prolific career, Warhol produced over 10,000 paintings and sculptures and nearly 12,000 drawings between the late 1940s until his death in 1987. As the most comprehensive chronicle of Warhol’s painting career to date, and the first systematic study of his studio practices, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné is an indispensable resource for scholars, curators, collectors, and critics, as well as for students and ardent fans of his work.
Neil Printz is the Editor of Volumes 3–6 and coedited the first two volumes of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. He was formerly Editor of the Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné and Research Curator for Twentieth-Century Art at The Menil Collection, Houston. Sally King-Nero, Executive Editor of Volumes 2-6 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, was Curator of Drawings and Photographs at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York.
Buy The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 6: Paintings and Sculptures mid-1977–1980 here.
