This is Warhol (2014)
is one of a series of Catherine Ingram books on artists. This one is about
American artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987).
The premise of this
book is from Warhol himself: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just
look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am.’ So this
is not a biography. Instead, it is a short illustrative look at Warhol’s life
and art.
The youngest of three
boys growing up in Pittsburgh as a migrant family, his father died when he was 14
years old. After art college in 1949 he moved to an apartment in New York with
his mother and 25 Siamese cats.
Ingram writes about
his experiments with ‘multiples’ during the Pop art scene of the 1960s with Roy
Lichtenstein; the influence of advertisements, comic books and cartoons; the
avant-garde phase; the Silver Factory; the Death and Disaster series; his five
hour and 21 minute film called Sleep; Business Art; Time Capsules; and death
revisited.
She tracks his
changing genres and themes and also the change in the artist – his ‘image
change’ after 1962, in which he created his signature look of dark glasses,
leather jacket, high Chelsea boots, and jeans. Culture critic Steven Shaviro
considered ‘Warhol’s greatest work of art was himself.’
There is also a short
section about how Warhol’s personality affected his ‘sense of space’ and how a
sense of space affected his personality.
This is Warhol is a
cardboard covered book with an artistic interior emulating Warhol’s style –
with information in comic book style and story boards. It’s a brief view of the
artist and some of the writing in the illustrations is small and difficult to
read. Nevertheless it is a creative depiction of the iconic artist.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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