Andy Warhol Portraits – Tony Shafrazi (2007)
This definitive monograph, curated by Tony Shafrazi, delves into Andy Warhol’s prolific and provocative career as a portraitist, capturing his obsession with fame, beauty, and mortality through his iconic silkscreened canvases. Spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, the book showcases Warhol’s electrifying portrayals of cultural icons—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor—alongside lesser-known but equally arresting figures like Brigid Berlin and Dennis Hopper.
Shafrazi, a close confidant of Warhol and a preeminent art dealer, contextualizes the portraits within Warhol’s broader artistic philosophy, where repetition and garish colors stripped celebrity of its aura, revealing both its artifice and its tragic humanity. Essays by critics and contemporaries dissect Warhol’s technical innovations (his blotted-line sketches, polaroid-to-silkscreen process) and his subversive blurring of high art and pop culture.
The volume’s lavish plates highlight Warhol’s dizzying range: from the deathly green Marilyn (1967) to the gilded drag queens of Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), each image a mirror held up to America’s obsessions.
“Not just faces, but x-rays of desire—where every portrait is a confession of the culture that worshipped it.”
The most comprehensive survey of Warhol’s portraiture, published alongside a blockbuster exhibition.
