Cast a Cold Eye

Following his near-fatal shooting in 1968, Andy Warhol entered a period that was long treated less seriously than the Pop breakthroughs of the preceding decade. Yet during the final eighteen years of his life, he produced an extraordinary range of paintings confronting political authority, violence, death, religion, abstraction, personal identity, and the circulation of images. Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Hammer and Sickle, Skulls, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Shadows, Rorschach, Camouflage, Oxidation, The Last Supper, and the late Self-Portraits demonstrate an artist repeatedly adapting his established techniques to subjects of increasing psychological and historical weight.

Published for Gagosian's expansive 2006 exhibition across its West 24th and newly opened West 21st Street galleries in New York, Cast a Cold Eye brings these bodies of work into sustained dialogue. The catalogue reproduces more than one hundred images, including the exhibited works and archival photographs. Vincent Fremont—Warhol's longtime collaborator and a founding director of the Andy Warhol Foundation—contributes “Andy Warhol: The Other Eighteen Years,” while philosopher and critic Boris Groys contributes “In Search of Suspended Time.” The volume also reproduces W. B. Yeats's 1933 poem Under Ben Bulben, from which the exhibition and publication derive their title.