Andy Warhol News 2024
by Gary Comenas
Translating Warhol to be published in August - Pre-orders now
Front cover of Translating Warhol by Reva Wolf (ed.)
Translating Warhol, a series of papers that were presented at a seminar last year organised by Reva Wolf, will be published by Bloomsbury in August and is available for pre-order at a sizable discount now from the Bloomsbury website.
The contents read like a "who's who" in the world of Warhol scholarship including Rusyn expert, Elaine Rusinko, who has previously written about Warhol's Ruthenian roots and is currently working on a book about his mother (anything by Rusinko is worth reading); Nina Schleif who wrote Andy Warhol Drag & Draw: The Unknown Fifties and edited Reading Andy Warhol; French art historian and critic, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn (author of Pissing Figures 1280-2014) whose insight into the way Warhol is translated (and sometimes mis-interpreted) by French writers is fascinating; Jean Wainwright on the BBC documentary Andy Warhol's America - and numerous other contributors - a complete list of the essays can be found on the Bloomsbury website.
Considering the amount of work that has gone into the book and the new information it contains (particularly in regard to the essays by Rusinko and Lebensztejn), it is well worth the price, especially with the pre-order discount. In the UK it can be ordered through Amazon. Highly recommended.
Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty opens June 9th
The exhibition Andy Warhol Velvet Rage and Beauty is running at the Neue NationalGalerie from June 9th to October 6th 1924 and will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue to be published in the U.K. in September.
Vincent Fremont to appear in La Mama reading of play about Ondine
Vincent Fremont, the former Vice President of Andy Warhol Enterprises Inc. (and co-director of Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story) will be one of the readers of High Priest, the new play about Andy Warhol superstar, Ondine, for the reading at La Mama in New York on 18 March 2024.
The Sixth Volume of the Andy Warhol catalogue raisonne will be published in July 2024 - and it will be two volumes!
Front cover of the box set of the new Andy Warhol catalogue raisonne
Volume 6 of the Andy Warhol catalogue raisonne will be published in July 2024. By executive editor Sally Ann-Nero and editor Neil Printz. Containing information on at least 740 paintings and sculptures. If you are writing on Andy Warhol's art, whether you are a journalist, an academic or a student, the catalogue raisonnes are indispensable for their accuracy and the historical detail they give about the works and about Andy Warhol's life. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Given the high quality of the volumes and the research that goes into them, the pre-publication price tag of $750 in the U.S or £500 in the U.K. for volume 6 - a two volume set - is a bargain. (Note that that price is only guaranteed on pre-sales.)
1 January 2024
Happy New Year!
Second edition of Edie, A Mystery Solved is published with new cover
New cover of 2nd edition of Edie, A Mystery Solved by Gary Comenas (available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Blackwell's and Waterstones online)
Who Killed Wonderboy?
Eric Emerson performing ballet as a youth on the cover of Who Killed Wonderboy?
At last, I've finished my exploration into the death of Warhol superstar Eric Emerson who once described himself as a "wonderboy" and starred in The Chelsea Girls, Lonesome Cowboys, San Diego Surf and Heat. The exact cause of death has been shrouded in mystery for some time. Was it a "hit and run" as reported by the press or was it, as a couple of his colleagues suggested, a "murder?"
Who Killed Wonderboy? and other stories is currently available on Amazon by clicking on the above links. (The Kindle edition will be discounted for two weeks to Amazon users.)
The Andy Warhol Red Self Portraits revisited
About a decade ago, a series of prints featuring a Warhol Self-Portrait with a red background were deemed to be not authentic by the Andy Warhol Authentication Board. A book featuring the controversy over the prints is due in November, written by Richard Dorment who was the art critic of a Conservative newspaper in England and also wrote for the New York Review of Books.
The reasons they were not deemed to be "Warhols" is clear from the reasons the Board (which no longer exists) gave to an owner of one of the prints at the time (quoted in What Andy Warhol Didn't Do.)
1. The series of Self-Portraits that Andy Warhol made in early 1964 consists of a group of works of the same size, produced from the same photographic source. Eleven works of this type have been documented by the editors of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné thus far. Each work in this series is different from all the others as noted below. This is not the case with respect to the work you submitted to the Andy Warhol Authentication Board. To date, ten paintings have been examined by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board that are identical to each other and to the work you submitted. The existence of ten identical works is without precedent in the corpus of Warhol's paintings.
2. The background of the Self-Portraits that Andy Warhol made in early 1964 is painted by hand; and each background has been painted a different color. The background of the painting you submitted and the backgrounds of the nine identical examples are printed, not hand-painted.
3. The eyes, skin tones, and the silver hair in the Self-Portraits that Andy Warhol made in early 1964 are hand-painted; the color of the eyes varies from work to work. The eyes, skin tones, and hair in the work you submitted and in the nine identical examples are printed, not hand-painted.
4. The only aspect of the Self-Portraits that Warhol made in early 1964 that is printed is the black silkscreen impression, printed over the areas of hand-painted color. Each impression varies among the works made by Warhol, as does the registration of the black screen over the ares of hand-painted color. This is not the case with respect to the work you submitted and the nine identical examples.
5. Warhol's Self-Portraits of early 1964 were all made on linen. The work you submitted and the nine identical examples were made on cotton.
6. Warhol's Self-Portraits were produced from a photograph that he submitted to the silkscreen fabricator with his instructions on a paste-up mechanical. The photograph in the mechanical was reproduced by the silkscreen fabricator onto a photo-sensitive silkscreen. The silkscreen was used by Warhol to depict the outlines of the head and the features of the face The tones from the photograph seen on the canvas as a pattern of black dots are known as halftone. The density of the halftone in the work you submitted to our review and in the nine identical examples is reduced, as compared to the density of the halftones on Warhol's early 1964 canvases, indicating the work you submitted and the other nine identical works examined by the Board were not made from the same silkscreen that Warhol used to make this series of work in early 1964.
7. Finally, as part of its research, the Board learned that the work you submitted and all nine identical examples were printed by a commercial printer in 1965. The printer claimed that he received materials and specifications from another party, and had never had any contact with Warhol himself.