Andy Warhol: A Retrospective

The book reproduces work from the full span of Andy Warhol's career, from his commercial drawings of the 1950s to the paintings of the 1980s. It is arranged around the themes of the exhibition it accompanied: celebrity portraits such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, the Disaster pictures (Car Crash, Electric Chair), Campbell's Soup Cans, Flowers and the Mao portraits. The exhibition included paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs and films, some of them never shown before. The plates are a mix of colour and black-and-white reproductions with reference illustrations. The book is an exhibition catalogue, not a photography monograph; photographs appear as one medium among several in Warhol's output. It was published for the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of 6 February to 2 May 1989, the first full-scale American retrospective of Warhol since 1970 and held two years after his death. The show was organized by Kynaston McShine, then Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, who edited the volume. Essays are by McShine, Robert Rosenblum, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Marco Livingstone.