Author(s): Tony Shafrazi

artists biographies

This book grew out of an exhibition that was organized by the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, in 2005. With the show, Shafrazi paid homage to a seminal display of Warhol's portraits that took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1979-80. Titled "Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 1970s," the Whitney exhibition presented for the first time a large array of the commissioned portraits that the artist began in the early 1970s as a way to offset the cost of multiplying activities at the Factory. Shafrazi's exhibition included many of the portraits shown in the original Whitney exhibition as well as others. This volume takes Shafrazi's exhibition even further, nearly doubling the number of works shown. Art historians and critics have long neglected this body of Warhol's work, preferring to discuss and study the more iconic Lizzes and Marilyns or Campbell's Soup Cans of the 1960s. Many of the portraits in this book have rarely been seen before. First published February 2007.