Books by Klaus Honnef
Pop Art
by Klaus Honnef
Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork.
Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from Hollywood's most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop Art also deployed methods of mass-production, reducing the role of the individual artist with mechanized techniques such as screen printing.
With featured artists including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, this book introduces the full reach and influence of a defining modernist movement.
About the series
Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHENs Basic Genre series features:
approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
a detailed, illustrated introduction
a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist
Copies
No copies available.
Warhol
The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of his—or any—age
To this day, mention the name “Andy Warhol” to almost anyone and you’ll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol’s name and dominated the public’s image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that.
In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. “The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,” as Gopnik writes. “That’s why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,” from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the “performance” of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom—and his attempted assassination.
The extent and range of Warhol’s success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasn’t been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warhol’s archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictions—he was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic.
Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today.
Copies
No copies available.
Warhol
The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of his—or any—age
To this day, mention the name “Andy Warhol” to almost anyone and you’ll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol’s name and dominated the public’s image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that.
In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. “The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,” as Gopnik writes. “That’s why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,” from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the “performance” of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom—and his attempted assassination.
The extent and range of Warhol’s success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasn’t been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warhol’s archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictions—he was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic.
Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today.
Copies
No copies available.
Warhol
Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is hailed as the most important proponent of the Pop art movement. A critical and creative observer of American society, he explored key themes of consumerism, materialism, media, and celebrity.
Drawing on contemporary advertisements, comic strips, consumer products, and Hollywood’s most famous faces, Warhol proposed a radical reevaluation of what constituted artistic subject matter. Through Warhol, a Campbell’s soup can and Coca Cola bottle became as worthy of artistic status as any traditional still life. At the same time, Warhol reconfigured the role of the artist. Famously stating “I want to be a machine,” he systematically reduced the presence of his own authorship, working with mass-production methods and images, as well as dozens of assistants in a studio he dubbed the Factory.
This book introduces Warhol’s multifaceted, prolific oeuvre, which revolutionized distinctions between “high” and “low” art and integrated ideas of living, producing, and consuming that remain central questions of modern experience.
Copies
No copies available.