ANDY WARHOL: The Last Decade

by Joseph D. Ketner II

In the last decade before his death in 1987, Warhol continued to produce mesmerizing works at an astounding pace. Influenced by the most prominent artists of the 1980s, including Basquiat, Haring, Schnabel, and Clemente, Warhol experimented with a combination of painting and screen printing to develop an extraordinary vocabulary of images that traversed a variety of genres. The result is a remarkable output, collected here in this companion to a touring exhibition organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum. This catalogue delves into the range of works Warhol was creating during his last years, including abstract paintings, collaborations, and his final self-portraits. Essays by Keith Hartley and Gregory Volk and contributions by Bruno Bischofberger, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel round out this compelling look at an artist whose most fecund work may have been produced in his last years.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Tommy Bat-Blog Brookshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a pretty nice book about the artwork created by Andy Warhol in the last 10 years of his life. I've seen a few other books try to cover this complex era & this one is the best I've seen. Now, I'm a pretty serious Warhol Fan & have read almost everything about his work. One thing I was amazed to see were a few photos of work that I had never seen before!

This book was actually written to coincide with an exhibition titled, "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade" which started at the Milwaukee Art Museum on September 26th, 2009. The show later traveled to Fort Worth, then Brooklyn, and ended on January 9th, 2011 in Baltimore. It's filled with multiple essays by different critics & other Artists who knew him. Overall, there's really not that much to read. I mean, it's an "Art Book" & it's main focus is showing works of art. It only took me an hour to devour the whole thing. But, you'll spent way more time than that enjoying all the full-page sharp color photos of many masterpieces.

This book is a total joy... Thank God for Libraries, ha!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice overview of Warhol's works during the decade before he died--and, for me, some surprises: the Rorschach paintings, the yarn series (which, in conjunction with the oxidation paintings, make for a funny, smart comment/critique of Abstract Expressionism and the works of Jackson Pollack in particular), the collaborations with Basquiat and Francesco Clemente (the former whose talent still escapes me, even though he is universally credited with getting Warhol back to hand painting). Still, an overview it is, and I would love to see a book several times the size of this one that could better encompass what Warhol produced during his last decade--as well as see an essay by a writer with a critical knowledge of the intersection of art and faith, as represented in Warhol's considerable body of religious paintings from this time.