Andy Warhol Prints

"I'm for mechanical art," said Andy Warhol (1928-87). "When I took up silkscreening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through commercial techniques of multiple reproduction." Printmaking was a vital artistic practice for Warhol. Prints figure prominently throughout his career from his earliest work as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s to the collaborative silkscreens made in the Factory during the 1960s and the commissioned portfolios of his final years. In their fascination with popular culture and provocative subverting of the difference between original and copy, Warhol's prints are recognized now as a prescient forerunner of today's hyper-sophisticated, hyper-saturated and hyper-accelerated visual culture. Andy Warhol: Prints, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Portland Art Museum--the largest of its kind ever to be presented--includes approximately 250 of Warhol's prints and ephemera from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, including iconic silkscreen prints of Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. Organized chronologically and by series, Andy Warhol: Prints establishes the range of Warhol's innovative graphic production as it evolved over the course of four decades, with a particular focus on Warhol's use of different printmaking techniques, beginning with illustrated books and ending with screen printing.

"For more than 20 years Warhol watched what got bought 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 edtion 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."--Jacket.

Warhol offers his observations of love, beauty, fame, work, and art and discusses the continuous play and display of his many fetishes.

An essay on Warhol's work with silkscreen printing accompanies a selection of his prints from the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

Oeuvre catalogus van het werk van de Amerikaanse pop-art schilder (1928- 1987).