Andy Warhol: The Alchemist of the Sixties

Retracing the creative universe of pop art's most famous figure

It is difficult to overstate the influence that American artist and provocateur Andy Warhol (1928-87) has had on art and culture worldwide since he first premiered the 32 Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. As part of a burgeoning pop-art scene in New York in the early 1960s, Warhol painted the things and images of the ordinary world--"images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second," as he explained it. "Comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles--all the great modern things." Warhol took these "great modern things" into the painter's studio and, copying and painting them through the photo-silkscreen process, turned them into Warhols. Like an alchemist, Warhol transformed the base materials of reality into something new: into pop art, into transfigured commodities and into art historical icons. Andy Warhol: The Alchemist of the Sixties focuses on this transformative power of Warhol's work. The publication brings together more than 140 works by Warhol, including examples of some of his most well-known series, like the Jackies and the Marilyns. With a particular focus on Warhol's engagement with consumerism, mythmaking, music and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, this volume retraces the creative universe of pop art's most famous figure.