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274.
Andy Warhol. Published on the occasion of the Andy Warhol exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February to March 1968 + original publisher's box.
Boston, MA: Boston Book and Art, April 1970. Third (revised) printing, including additional photographs of Warhol and his Factory entourage taken at the exhibition opening. Housed in the scarce publisher’s printed cardboard box. 4to.
Illustrated perfect bound wrappers, featuring a graphic version in five colours of Warhol’s “Flower” paintings repeated in four rows of three. Unpaginated (c. 640pp.), printed on newsprint on the rotary presses of the Sydsvenska Dagbladets, Malmö.
The catalogue to Andy Warhol’s first one-person exhibition held outside America, edited by Warhol, Kasper König, Pontus Hultén and Olle Granath. Dual-language English/Swedish 14pp. text consisting of 27 statements by Warhol, including the first official appearance in print of his famous quote on disposable celebrity: “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes”.
Typography by John Melin and Gösta Svensson. Designed by Kasper König, whose sequence of pages and emphasis on repetition resulted in a work now considered to be as much an artist’s book, or multiple, as it is a catalogue (using the museum’s Xerox machine many of the images made available to König by Ivan Karp [director of the Leo Castelli Gallery] were photocopied by him several times).
The book contains three groups of images: the first documents the full range of Warhol’s artworks (although most of them were not shown in the exhibition), and the second and third document Warhol and his milieu, including several pictures of the Velvet Underground. For these two sections König commissioned Billy Name and Stephen Eric Shore, whose b/w photographs of Warhol and his circle at the Factory appear without captions. Name’s photographs (the negatives for which were lost long ago) consists of 274 images, and Stephen Shore’s sequence consists of 170 images, one per page.
The exhibition itself garnered widespread attention (though a relatively small number of visitors, in part due to the extremely cold winter), and showcased Warhol’s screenprinted “Flower” and “Electric Chair” paintings, “Marilyn” prints, film screenings of “The Chelsea Girls”, and an installation of 500 Brillo boxes.
This remarkably clean and well-preserved copy shows only a minor top right corner bump to the first few leaves, and, unusually, no creasing to the spine, due in large part to it having been contained in its original (now slightly worn) publisher’s box for the past fifty years. The catalogue was originally distributed in nightclubs and record shops as well as museums, becoming first a cult object, then a collector’s item.
A beautiful copy, scarce in this condition, more so accompanied by the publisher’s box.
Price:
£850.00
