The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné is delighted to announce that Volume 6: Paintings and Sculptures mid-1977–1980 will be published by Phaidon Press in July 2024. Comprised of two slip-cased books, Volume 6 will document nearly 750 works of art produced by Warhol during the last two-and-a-half years of the 1970s, featuring all 273 paintings from his Shadows series. This epic project spans the entire period covered in this volume and includes the famous Shadow paintings exhibited by the Lone Star Foundation in early 1979. The two books also record Warhol’s Retrospective and Reversal series; his first diamond dust paintings—Gems and Shadows; his Studio 54 and Heart gift paintings; his little-known Human Heart paintings; his commissioned portraits of 1978 and 1979; and unique projects such as his hand-painted BMW Art Car.
“The sheer visual evidence and multiplicity of Warhol’s work during the 1970s overwhelmingly rebuts the myth that after the 1960s, he was an artist in decline,” observes Neil Printz, Editor of the Catalogue Raisonné. “The brilliant succession of series from Mao (1972) to the Shadows and Reversals (1978–1980) reveal an artist at the height of his powers, a trajectory that continues unbroken until Warhol’s death.”
Volume 7: Paintings late 1979–1981, the next book of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, is now in preparation, the first of five projected volumes dedicated to the artist’s paintings and sculptures of the 1980s. “It is a little remarked upon fact,” notes Printz, “that Warhol produced more works during the 1970s than in the 1960s, and even more works in the 1980s than the 1970s.” Volume 7 opens with the historic encounter between Warhol and the German artist Joseph Beuys, and the iconic Beuys portrait series he painted in 1980. In addition, Warhol also produced approximately 250 portrait paintings, surpassing by two-fold his peak years of commissioned portraiture during the 1970s. Two series of 1980–81, Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century and Myths, introduce a new modality of thematic subject matter into Warhol’s portrait practice, the latter series featuring Warhol’s self-portrait as “The Shadow,” the shape-shifting radio star of his childhood. Volume 7 will also document two series—Diamond Dust Shoes and Dollar Signs—that revisit and radically reconfigure storied subjects and themes associated with the artist’s work from the 1950s and early 1960s.