Andy Warhol (1928–87), a leading figure in the 1960s pop art movement, is best known today for his brightly colored silkscreen paintings of celebrities and soup cans. His work challenged preconceived notions about fine art, and in doing so blurred the lines between art and popular culture. In addition to his well-known paintings, Warhol produced a large body of photographic work–specifically, Polaroid snapshots.
Throughout the 1970s, Warhol documented his life using a Polaroid camera, taking spontaneous photographs of friends, celebrities, and associates. He also used Polaroid images as source material for his commissioned portraits, as the bright exposure of the Polaroid translated well into his signature high contrast style. Warhol produced more than 40,000 Polaroids between 1970 and 1987, a small portion of which he meticulously arranged into over 100 small red Holson Polaroid albums–the namesake for his Little Red Books.
This exhibition includes all twenty Polaroids from Warhol's Little Red Book #114, which were taken in July and August of 1972. The photographs, likely taken while Warhol was entertaining friends at his summer retreat in Montauk, include candid portraits of members of Warhol’s social circle such as model and food writer Maxime de la Falaise, model and actress Amina Warsuma, actress Betsy von Furstenberg, and Claude Picasso, among others. The decidedly unglamorous snapshots of everyday life contained in the Little Red Books demonstrate Warhol’s compulsive desire to capture, collect, and organize his world.
