Assouline
The Impossible Collection of Fashion
The hundred most iconic dresses of the twentieth century, hand-bound.
$995.00
Edward Penfield, poster for Harper’s, 1897. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Phaidon
Andy Warhol “Giant” Size
The visual biography of the century’s most consequential artist.
$150.00
Available · worldwide delivery
The maison’s noteOver two thousand images across six hundred giant pages: the Factory years, the portraits, the business of art. A reference volume that behaves like a monument.
- Author
- Phaidon Editors
- Publisher
- Phaidon
- Published
- October 2006
- Pages
- 624
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Oversized
- Language
- English
The LIBRO Note
Phaidon’s giant-format visual biography treats Warhol the way Warhol treated everything else: in volume. More than two thousand images across six hundred oversized pages cover the Factory, the portraits, the publishing ventures and the business of art. The maison keeps it as the working reference on the artist who made repetition, commerce and celebrity legitimate artistic material, questions every collector still lives inside.
The Library Essay
Accumulation is the honest way to show this artist
Phaidon published the book in 2006 at a size that has to be carried with two hands and read on a table, 624 pages holding close to two thousand illustrations, some fourteen hundred of them in colour. Steven Bluttal edited the material with the editors of the house, and the sequence runs as a chronology of everything the studio put into the world rather than a selection of the best-known paintings.
Dave Hickey’s essay carries the interpretation, following Warhol from the commercial illustrator of the 1950s to the figure the art world eventually had to take on his own terms. Chapter openers written by people who knew him supply the first-hand detail that a survey of this length would otherwise smooth away.
The scale earns its keep because quantity was the subject. A single Marilyn or a single soup can invites the viewer to search for meaning inside one image, and that is the reading his work resists. Six hundred pages of output, much of it made by other hands under his direction, show a practice organised like a business and meant to be judged as a body of production. Phaidon has since reissued the contents in smaller formats, where the argument carries less force.
In the Collections
Companion Works
Taschen
Annie Leibovitz
The collector’s edition of a career that defined the modern portrait.
$2,500.00