Warhol by the Book
Williams College Museum of Art
March 7 to August 16, 2015
AN EXHIBITION that ran this past summer at the Williams College Museum of Art, War-hol By the Book, was quite remarkable both for the sheer beauty of its objects and for revealing a side of Warhol that, amazingly, had never been shown before. The show certainly opened my eyes to new ways of understanding and interpreting Warhol’s art. The exhibit showcased almost 100 books, from crime novels to popular fiction, from children’s books to textbooks, to which Warhol made an artistic contribution.
His most productive period in this genre occurred while he was making his living as a graphic artist. Directly related to his shoe illustrations for I. Magnin is the charming A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu (1955), in which each shoe is given a tag line by the openly gay poet Ralph Pomeroy. A particular standout is titled “The Autobiography of Alice B. Shoe.” (One of Warhol’s blotted line drawings depicts Pomeroy with a heart almost vibrating in the margin of the illustration, and the notation “Ralph P X me.”) Perhaps the most luxurious book is 1957’s A Gold Book, produced when Warhol was still transitioning from commercial to fine art. Printed in an edition of 100 and based on photographs, it included line drawings of shoes, bags, and handsome men. Gold would, of course, reappear in his famed 1962 silkscreen, Gold Marilyn Monroe.
How much of anything Warhol actually read is a mystery. In a 1977 interview with High Times he said that he didn’t read much and mostly looked at the pictures, but named Jacqueline Susann, Frank Rich, and Victor Hugo as his favorite writers. We know that newspaper clippings and magazine pages were used as source art, and many photographs show Warhol surrounded by reading material. Some images of his home show desks piled high with books, and he’s known to have spent a lot of money on books. The Williams exhibit also includes a re-creation of a fraction of his personal library. Unfortunately, there’s no indication of how these specific books were chosen for the exhibit. Among them are numerous contemporary bestsellers, standard reference works, play anthologies; Patricia Nell Warren’s 1974 The Front Runner; classics by Gide and Wilde; and curiosities such the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex (1950) with its serious anatomical color plates. It may possibly have served, as other books in his library must have, as source material for his art. (In his earliest years, a boyfriend who worked at the New York Public Library kept him supplied with images to copy.) There are also an eyebrow-raising number of titles in the diet category. (Warhol’s affinity for diet pills is well-documented, and the title of his 1968 book a: A Novel refers to amphetamines.)
A catalog of the exhibit called Reading Andy Warhol, based on a showing in Munich in 2013, was published by Museum Brandhorst. At the moment this is as close as we can come to an exhibit catalog for Warhol By the Book. It contains a dozen scholarly essays and is profusely illustrated. The exhibit itself was organized by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and it will reopen at that venue next year and run from October 9 to January 10, 2016.
