Warhol

A shy, pale youth from working-class Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol became a popular commercial illustrator in 1950s New York, then a successful fine artist. With his depictions of Campbell soup cans and dollar bills, pop art broke the grip of abstract expressionism on the marketplace. Bourdon ( Pop ism: The Warhol '60s ) is especially good on these early years. This chunky, lavishly illustrated monograph also documents the trendy artistic and social whirl at Warhol's Factory and covers his avant-garde filmmaking in detail. Bourdon sees Warhol as an innovator who injected a freshness into portrait, still life and genre. He argues that Warhol's paintings of the 1970s held up a mirror to the ``me'' generation, while in the '80s he became a post-modernist, recycling familiar motifs in novel contexts. (Dec.)