"When I was born, I came home to my grandfather's house. His name was Morris Cohen. He was my mother's father. I lived with him for three years until my parents built a small little house and we moved away. But from the time I was born until he died when I was 19, I either spoke to him or saw him every day. He owned a hardware store that catered to plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, contractors. It was an early version of a contractors' supply store. It was called 'The Save Supply Company.' He was a very large man, and he felt he could do anything with his hands. He made tables, he fixed automobiles, he was an electrician, and he was lousy at all of it. But through sheer force of will, he forged ahead." Jim Dine

"Superb...Gopnik persuasively assembles his case over the course of this mesmerising book, which is as much art history and philosophy as it is biography" Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian When critics attacked Andy Warhol's Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: He claimed that he silkscreened to avoid the hard work of painting, although he was actually a meticulous workaholic; in interviews he presented himself as a silly naif when in private he was the canniest of sophisticates. Blake Gopnik's definitive biography digs deep into the contradictions and radical genius that led Andy Warhol to revolutionise our cultural world. Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol's surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist's path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his groundbreaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the '70s and '80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture. Warhol sought out all the most glamorous figures of his times - Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Barons de Rothschild - despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness. Behind the public glitter of the artist's Factory, with its superstars, drag queens and socialites, there was a man who lived with his mother for much of his life and guarded the privacy of his home. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.) Filled with new insights into the artist's work and personality, Warhol asks: Was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: Yes.

"I couldn't think of a better place to have a dialogue about art today and what it can be" - Jeff Koons Curated by Koons himself, together with guest curator Norman Rosenthal, this show features seventeen important works, fourteen of which have never been exhibited in the UK before. They span the artist's entire career and his most well-known series, including Equilibrium, Statuary, Banality, Antiquity and his recent Gazing Ball sculptures and paintings. This exhibition will provoke a conversation between his creations and the history of art and ideas with which his work engages. Jeff Koons burst onto the contemporary art scene in the 1980s. He has been described as the most famous, important, subversive, controversial and expensive artist in the world. From his earliest works Koons has explored the 'ready-made' and 'appropriated image', using unadulterated found objects and creating painstaking replicas of ancient sculptures and Old Master paintings which almost defy belief in their craftsmanship and precision. Throughout his career Koons has pushed at the boundaries of contemporary art practice, stretching the limits of what is possible. This publication accompanies an exhibiton, running from February to June, 2019 at the Ashmolean. Koons will be in conversation with Martin Kemp at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in May 2019. Contents: Director's Foreword; interview with Jeff Koons (by Xa Sturgis); Jeff Koons and the Sheen and Shine of Time (Sir Norman Rosenthal); catalogue entries; Jeff Koon biography.

Pop America, 1965-1975 accompanies the first traveling exhibition to stage Pop art as a hemispheric phenomenon. The richly illustrated catalogue reveals the skill with which Latin American and Latino/a artists adapted familiar languages of mass media, fashion, and advertising to create experimental art in a startling range of mediums. In a new era in hemispheric relations, artists enacted powerful debates over what "America" was and what Pop art could do, offering a radical new view onto the postwar "American way of life" and Pop's presumed political neutrality. Nine essays grounded in original archival research narrate transnational accounts of how these artists remade America. The authors connect the decisive design of the Chicano/a movement in the United States with the vivid images of the Cuban Revolution and new contributions to the Mexican printmaking tradition. They follow iconic Pop images and tactics as they traveled between New York and Sao Paulo, Bogota and Mexico City, San Francisco and La Habana. Pop art emerges in a fully American profile, picturing youthful celebration and painful violence, urban development and rural practices, and pronouncements of freedom made equally by democratic and repressive regimes. The bilingual catalogue reconstitutes a network of artists from the decade, including ASCO, Judith Baca, Eduardo Costa, Antonio Dias, Marcos Dimas, Felipe Ehrenberg, Rupert Garcia, Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, Rubens Gerchman, Edgardo Gimenez, Alberto Gironella, Jose Gomez Fresquet (Fremez), Beatriz Gonzalez, Gronk, Juan Jose Gurrola, Emilio Hernandez Saavedra, Robert Indiana, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Marisol, Raul Martinez, Cildo Meireles, Marta Minujin, Helio Oiticica, Dalila Puzzovio, Hugo Rivera Scott, Jorge de la Vega, and Lance Wyman, among others. Pop America, 1965-1975 will be on display at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, from October 4, 2018 to January 13, 2019; at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 21 to July 21, 2019; and at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art from September 21 to December 8, 2019.

""Pop L.A." maps the relation between a new urban and cultural space and the artists who confronted it and gave it form. Los Angeles in the 1960s in Cecile Whiting's smart and incisive study was home not only to a zany, outre popular culture but also to a Pop Art as expansive, crisscrossed, and de-centered as the city's entangled freeways and urban sprawl. Ruscha's photographs of gas stations and parking lots, Hockney's paintings of swimming pools and tract homes, Rodia's Watts Towers, and more--after this book, none will look the same."--Anthony W. Lee, Mount Holyoke College, author of "Picturing Chinatown"
"Sun, surf, sand, sex, strip malls, subdivisions: all are present in Cecile Whiting's trenchant anatomy of "Pop Los Angeles," And all were central to the vision artists constructed of this protean city as a site of both pleasure and emptiness, speed and stasis. Some artists, however, went further, not merely representing the city, but intervening in it, and for Whiting, the results--whether a performance by Kaprow or a tower by Rodia--further demonstrate the wild diversity of a multicentric city that somehow seems both more and less than a circumscribable place."--Anne Wagner, author of "Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture"
"In "Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s," Cecile Whiting proves herself an expert guide to the cultural and artistic landscape of Los Angeles. From hot rods to parking lot Happenings, from the Watts Towers to Womanhouse, the book thrillingly remaps the multiple intersections of Pop art and Southern California in the 1960s and early 70s. Beautifully researched and written, Pop L.A. is a major work of modern art-historicalscholarship. It is also one hell of a ride."--Richard Meyer, author of "Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art"
"From the Ferus Gallery to the Woman's Building, Cecile Whiting has fashioned an indispensable book. Thanks to her brilliant remapping, the landscape of art in Los Angeles will never look the same."--Kenneth E. Silver, author of "Making Paradise: Art, Modernity, and the Myth of the French Riviera"

'Ours is music with built-in hatred.' Pete Townshend A Band with Built-In Hate pictures The Who through the prism of pop art and the levelling of high and low culture it brought about. Peter Stanfield guides us through the British pop revolution as it was embodied by the band: first, under the mentorship of arch-mod Peter Meaden; and then with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two aspiring filmmakers, at the very centre of things in Soho. Guided by contemporary commentators - most conspicuously, Nik Cohn - Stanfield tells of a band driven by fury, and of what happened when they moved from explosive 45s to expansive concept albums. Above all, he describes how The Who confronted their lost youth as it was echoed in punk."

Although he never studied at the Royal College of Art, Antony Donaldson's friendships with RCA students Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips put him firmly in the vanguard of the Pop Art movement in London in the 1960s. Born in 1939, Donaldson was chosen in 1964 for the landmark New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery which included Allen Jones and David Hockney and he became the first Pop Artist to sell his work to the Tate. Like Hockney, Donaldson dreamed of a quiet and relaxed life in southern California and moved to Los Angeles between 1966 and 1968, where he painted daringly simple compositions using saturated colour and sensual forms. In later years Donaldson took up sculpture in a variety of media; his most famous piece is the giant Buddha-like head of Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Suspense, in the courtyard of the Gainsborough Film Studios in London. This monograph includes an illustrated chronology, an exhibition checklist and a bibliography

In 1985, the Sohio oil company commissioned Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen to design and construct a large outdoor sculpture for its new corporate headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. The result was Free Stamp, a bold and distinctive installation that captured both a Pop Art sensibility and a connection to the city's industrial past. Sohio executives approved the design, and work was already underway, when British Petroleum acquired the company. The new owners quickly decided that the sculpture was "inappropriate" for their building and attempted to rid themselves of Free Stamp by donating it to the city of Cleveland-a gift that the city initially had no desire to accept. After much debate and public protest, the sculpture found a home in Willard Park, where it stands today. This is the first study of any sculpture by Oldenburg and van Bruggen to examine the genesis of their art from conception to installation. Edward J. Olszewski has put together a fascinating narrative based on interviews with the artists, archival material from city records, and in-house corporate memoranda, as well as letters to the editor and political cartoons. He traces the development of the sculpture from the artists' first sketches and models to the installation of the completed work in its urban environment.

Dealing with the power of artistic gesture, each work, presented here in stunning colour, features a blue glass gazing ball that sits on a painted aluminum shelf attached to the front of the painting that reflects both the painting and the viewer. Through the simple act of placing a gazing ball in front of the images, painting and sculpture are reunited for maximum sensory perception.

Accompanying catalogue of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Paris. The catalogue includes a fully illustrated, comprehensive listing of the paintings, drawings, and prints in Lichtenstein's Expressionism series. Among the styles and movements appropriated by Lichtenstein, his borrowing of Expressionist motifs--from Alexei Jawlensky's close-up, pensive faces to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's jagged, feline figures--strikes the clearest irony. Including key paintings, sculpture, drawings, and woodcuts, this catalogue demonstrates the bold paradox that Lichtenstein posed by translating Expressionist subjects into the primary colors and pop flatness of his signature style.

Announcing the new Princeton University Art Museum Monograph Series: Princeton University Art Museum Monographs is a new series of in-depth explorations of the museum's rich collections. Beautifully designed and produced, these books by leading and emerging scholars offer new insights and perspectives on a single work or group of works from Princeton's distinguished permanent collection. Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, and Alex Katz have all come to define the Pop art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. This handsomely illustrated book focuses on 40 understudied and rarely seen late paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by these influential artists in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. Pop Art offers fresh insights into the ways in which artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture. For example, Lichtenstein is repositioned as a classical "studio artist"; Wesselmann is shown to be playfully preoccupied with academic genres; and Indiana is interpreted less as a Pop artist than as a folk artist in a mass-cultural context. This important book also features an engaging introduction by Hal Foster that places these new interpretations in the context of the history of Pop art and its critical literature. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Princeton University Art Museum (March 24 - August 12, 2007)