The 607 paintings and one sculpture documented in Volume 4 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne were produced during a period of less than three years, from late 1974 through early 1977. In September 1974, Warhol changed studios, moving across Union Square from the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West to the third floor of 860 West Broadway. Like Volumes 2 and 3, Volume 4 is identified with a new studio, where Warhol continued to work for a decade, until he moved into his last studio at 22 East 33rd Street on December 3, 1984. Volume 4 may be seen as the first in a series of books associated with one studio that will document an enormously productive ten-year period in Warhol's oeuvre from the mid seventies to the mid eighties.

In January 1964 Warhol moved his studio to East Forty-seventh Street and began to produce works in series, allowing him to create open-ended aggregations of boxes or canvases that could be combined, recombined, or left as single units. This volume of the catalogue raisonne reproduces the series Thirteen Most Wanted Men; seven distinct series of box sculptures, including Brillo, Heinz Ketchup, and Del Monte Peach Halves, among others; the Jackie Paintings, based on press coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963; a series of portraits, including 11 self-portraits; Marilyn and Jackie paintings of mid-1964, with which Warhol introduced a new procedure in the studio - painting in areas of local colour by hand; and the 1964 Flowers series, probably Warhol's earliest allusion to abstract painting. Linich's rare photographs of works and people inside The Factory, as well as archival photos of gallery and museum installations showing original combinations of these serial works, and original newspaper clippings and silkscreen mechanicals. Whenever possible, catalogue entries attempt to record how and when a multi-canvas work came to be assembled in its present format. for readers to find their way through the catalogue entries. These list for each work the standard data (dimensions, date, present owner, inscriptions and special notes), provenance, exhibitions and literature. Volumes are organized according to catalogue number, with works reproduced in numerical order, followed by the corresponding texts. this volume includes appendices documenting each of Warhol's solo museum exhibitions of the period, with a list of every work included in each exhibition. Additional reference material includes notes to the catalogue texts; a title index; and a comprehensive general index. Indexes cross-reference works with their catalogue numbers and page numbers as they appear in the book. editors Georg Frei and Neil Printz began primary research in 1993, advised by the distinguished curators and art historians Kynaston McShine and Robert Rosenblum. Experts from the Andy Warhol Foundation reviewed archival materials, personally examined nearly each work of art, analyzed works in museums in their conservation facilities and discussed them with conservators, submitted works for review by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, and interviewed Warhol's assistants and colleagues to assemble a customized database of works unparalleled in Warhol scholarship. Warhol's method of working in serial compositions, silkscreen, and repeating units challenges traditional art connoisseurship and begs the question not only of what is and what is not Warhol, but which Warhol is it? For each work, the catalogue answers, among other things, two central questions: When was it made? and How was it executed?

"This third volume of the catalogue dedicated to publishing the complete paintings, sculptures and drawings of Andy Warhol (1928-87) focuses on the years 1970 to 1974. With the authoritative writing and fascinating attention to detail of the first two volumes, Warhol's works of these four years are comprehensively catalogued and illustrated, with the exception of the drawings to be included in a subsequent volume.
At the time this volume begins Warhol had been working at his second factory, his studio at 33 Union Square West, since 1968 and his painting activity had not resumed since his recovery from having been shot that same year. He did not have a painting studio at this building until late 1971 or early 1972 and was instead concentrating on film and sculpture, including the ""Rain Machine,"" as discussed in Chapter One. It was the acquiring of his first Big Shot polaroid camera that shifted his momentum back to painting again and he began to photograph his sitters, taking 25-100 shots, to capture a personality before beginning a painting.
Portraits of key figures of the time demonstrate his development of his new painterly style, mature by late 1972. The ""Mao Series"" was the first painting series since 1968, consisting of at least 199 paintings made between March 1972 and August 1973. His Mao paintings premiered in a grand exhibition in Paris in early 1974, and his portrait subjects included many of the most socially prominent and fashionable members of Parisian society, such as Yves Saint Laurent, Helene Rochas, and Sylvie de Waldner, as well as members of the international art world such as David Hockney, the dealer Alexandre Iolas, Henry Geldzahler. His painting style at this time was summed up by Warhol himself as 'sloppy and fast', painting wet-on-wet paint on top of the photographic image and screen prints, sometimes with fingers rather than brush. His style would change again in 1974 but in this volume we see several series and numerous commissioned portraits with this painterly style. He worked on series alongside commissions, and that of the Dada and Surrealist artist Man Ray, the subject of Chapter 5, was a series of some sixty works that developed from a commissioned portrait.
Including transcriptions, the diaries Warhol kept in 1972 and 1973, and the Polaroids he took on his travels through Europe and of his subjects, this volume has a strong narrative that presents the artist at a time of great change in his work. The 1970s have been often neglected in studies of Warhol's career and this volume, highlighting his extraordinary engagement with the culture and society of the time, brings to deserved attention the work of the first four years of the decade."