NEW PALTZ — Reva Wolf, a faculty member at the State University of New York at New Paltz, gives fresh insight into the work of popular American artist Andy Warhol in her new book, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s.
Warhol is usually remembered as the artist who said that he wanted to be a machine and that no one need ever look further than the surface when evaluating him or his art. Arguing against this carefully crafted pop image, Wolf shows in her original and fascinating study, that Warhol was in fact deeply emotionally engaged with the people around him – poets, artists, filmmakers – and that this was reflected in his art.
Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, including interviews, personal and public archives, tape recordings, documentary photographs, and works of art, Wolf offers dramatic evidence that Warhol understood the literary imagination of his generation and that recognizing his literary activities is essential to understanding his art.
Wolf is an assistant professor of art history at SUNY New Paltz. She is the author of Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730 to 1850 (D. R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1991) and numerous articles and essays. She earned her bachelor of arts from Brandeis University in 1978; and her master’s (1981) and doctoral degrees (1987) from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Wolf will be available to sign copies of the book, published by the University of Chicago Press, at the Ariel Bookstore in New Paltz on November 21, 5 to 7 p.m.
