To the general public, Andy Warhol is known as a painter of famous faces, from Liz and Marilyn and Jackie and Marlon to his own ever-changing self-portrait. Less known are the portraits he made throughout his career of socialites, art dealers, collectors, politicians, and a variety of contemporary cult figures, mostly commissioned work that helped finance Warhol's many other artistic activities. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Warhol's many portraits, including well-known icons as well as many works largely unknown even by avid Warhol followers. Included are more than 300 portraits made by Warhol from the early 1960s until his death in 1987, assembled as a face-book of the amazing cast of characters that populated Warhol's fascinating, star-studded, and, at times, sordid world. As Warhol said, ""I think everybody is my friend."" Included in this book is an introduction by gallerist Tony Shafrazi, who has a long history with the work of Andy Warhol, and essays by Warhol experts, established art historians, and critics Carter Ratcliff and Robert Rosenblum, who lend insight into one of the least fully known but nevertheless prolific aspects of Warhol's endlessly fascinating career.

Author Biography

Tony Shafrazi is the director of the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, opened in 1979. He first met Andy Warhol in 1965 and started showing his work in his gallery in the early 1980s.Carter Ratcliff is a poet and art critic. Among his books of poetry are Fever Coast, Give Me Tomorrow, and Arrivederci, Modernismo. His writings on art include monographs on Andy Warhol and John Singer Sargent, as well as The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art and Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975. He has taught at a variety of institutions, including Hunter College, in New York, and The New York Studio School, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, several NEA Art Critics Grants, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association.Robert Rosenblum is Professor of Fine Arts at New York University and Stephen and Nan Swid Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He has written extensively on the work of Andy Warhol, including the books Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, Andy Warhol Knives, and Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Seventies and Eighties, among his many other books on the subject of art. He was the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award of the College Art Association for Distinction in Art and Architectural Criticism in 1981, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2003, and is a contributing editor for Artforum magazine.