Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS
Featured in Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again exhibition catalogue
Essay Excerpt:
I’ve got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything. And then I decide that I should try to fall in love, and that’s what I’m doing now with Jon Gould, but then it’s just too hard.
—Andy Warhol, diary entry, 1981
I’m going to the doctor who puts crystals on you and it gives you energy. . . . Jon’s gotten interested in that kind of stuff—he says it gives you “powers,” and I think it sounds like a good thing to be doing. Health is wealth.
—Andy Warhol, diary entry, 1981
“Nearly thirty years have passed since Warhol’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, and the perception of his work and legacy has shifted quite dramatically. Warhol the queer artist, Warhol the filmmaker, and Warhol the photographer have all emerged in new lights. If Robert Rosenblum, in his catalogue essay for that first retrospective, “Warhol as Art History,” could pitch the artist as a painter situated safely within the canon, the discourse has now expanded to recognize the sexual and transgressive nature of Warhol’s practice through a discussion of queer politics and cultural studies. While the literature has blossomed since the 1990s, a need for revision remains: there has been a tendency to stretch Warhol to please the needs of various postmodernist camps, and repetition in the narrative has led to a scholarly imbalance, an almost fetishistic focus on Warhol’s output of the 1960s. His final paintings are neglected and rejected and a serious investigation has yet to be undertaken. In particular, the divide between the readings of the “queer Warhol” and of the “religious Warhol” has perpetuated a misunderstanding of his Last Supper paintings and his response to the aids epidemic. What would it look like if these two camps merged?”
About the Catalogue:
One of the most emulated and significant figures in modern art, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) rose to fame in the 1960s with his iconic Pop pieces. Warhol expanded the boundaries by which art is defined and created groundbreaking work in a diverse array of media that includes paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, films, and installations.
This ambitious book is the first to examine Warhol’s work in its entirety. It builds on a wealth of new research and materials that have come to light in recent decades and offers a rare and much-needed comprehensive look at the full scope of Warhol’s production—from his commercial illustrations of the 1950s through his monumental paintings of the 1980s. Donna De Salvo explores how Warhol’s work engages with notions of public and private, the redefinition of media, and the role of abstraction, while a series of incisive and eye-opening essays by eminent scholars and contemporary artists touch on a broad range of topics, such as Warhol’s response to the AIDS epidemic, his international influence, and how his work relates to constructs of self-image seen in social media today.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(11/12/18–03/31/19)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(05/18/19–09/02/19)
Art Institute of Chicago
(10/20/19–01/26/20)
ISBN: 9780300236989
Publication Date: November 27, 2018
Publishing Partner: Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art
400 pages, 10 1/4 x 12 3/4
485 color + 120 b/w illus., including 2 gatefolds