Andy Warhol

Reissued for 2020, Tate Introductions: Andy Warhol is an accessible yet authoritative book, the perfect introduction to the life and work of an artist who remains as relevant today as ever. Part of our popular Tate Introductions series, it offers a concise introduction and pictorial overview of one of the greatest modern artists, fully illustrated in colour.

A central figure in pop art, Andy Warhol (1928–87) was one of the most significant and influential artists of the later twentieth century. In the 1960s he began to explore the growing interplay between mass culture and the visual arts, and his constant experimentation with new processes for the dissemination of art played a pivotal role in redefining access to culture and art as we know it today. At the height of his fame, Warhol claimed he was ‘abandoning painting’, shifting his practice towards a commitment to the theoretically limitless channels of publishing, film, fashion, music and broadcasting. It was this ‘transmission’ of art and radical ideas that embodied his ethical conviction that ‘art should be for everyone’.

Stephanie Straine is Curator of Exhibitions and Projects at Modern Art Oxford. She specialises in American art of the 1960s.