About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits (Essays) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits (Essays) Book

In the early 1950s he sketched them. In the '60s he filmed them. And during the '70s and '80s he primarily silk-screened them. But whatever the medium, faces were a dominant theme of Andy Warhol's work throughout his career. And though his portrait work was as often decried by art critics as it was praised by viewers, he never wavered in his interest. About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits is, as the title suggests, a narrowly focused book that explores this favorite subject. Among the book's 75 or so plates, images of Jackie, Marilyn, and Mao join portraits of subjects who need last names to be identified and of Warhol himself. Readers will notice that all of the images--movie stills of Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed, Polaroids of Warhol in drag, early Interview magazine covers--are unmistakably the work of the same artist. Warhol's choice of wide-ranging portrait subjects, from famous pop-culture figures to anonymous friends and faces drawn from his imagination, allowed him to explore issues of identity, celebrity, and even portraiture itself. With its lovely plates and scholarly essays, this slim but expertly produced book--published to coincide with an exhibition at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum in the fall of 1999 and the Miami Art Museum in spring 2000--would make a worthy addition to the library of any Warhol fan. --Jordana Moskowitz Read More

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  • Product Description

    The most widely admired paintings by Andy Warhol--and the most reviled--are his portraits. About Face, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum, presents the first overview of Warhol's portraiture to embrace all periods and media. "About face" refers both to Warhol's fascination with images of the human face and to his characteristic method of reversal. For example, Warhol reverses the portraitist's goal to capture the essence of a subject's individuality in his factory production of "Warhol portraits." His portraits are about the creation of faces (as the public masks onto which identity is projected) rather than the revealing of a "true" self. Warhol's portraits, which reveal the artificial aspects of public identity, initiate a "democracy" of fame and beauty, where everyone has superstar potential. Nicholas Baume's essay shows how Warhol's career-long interest in the representation of people, including himself, marks a radical departure from the humanist portrait tradition. In his essay on the pre-Pop shoe collages and male portraits, Richard Meyer looks at Warhol's complex and camp rethinking of gender, sexuality, and portraiture throughout the 1950s. Douglas Crimp focuses on Warhol's portrait-related film Blow Job, offering an alternative to the accepted interpretation of the underground classic as voyeuristic. The book contains a number of images published for the first time, including newly made stills from films of the 1960s and videos of the 1980s. Copublished with The Wadsworth Atheneum. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE: Wadsworth Atheneum Hartford, Connecticut September 23, 1999-January 30, 2000 Miami Art Museum Miami, Florida March 24-June 4, 2000

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