Andy Warhol

(American, 1928-1987)

Wild Raspberries

Footnotes

Wild Raspberries is the last of the books Warhol designed in the 1950s, a decade that witnessed the development of the artistic techniques, reliance on source material and reproductive processes he used throughout his career, especially with regards to printmaking.

Working as a commercial illustrator while relentlessly drawing and printing on the side was key to this development that later led him to become the Pop icon he is now most remembered for. While his reputation as an illustrator grew between 1953 and 1959, he self-published a series of portfolios, books and individual prints of which Wild Raspberries is a fine example.

Sometimes restrained in what he was commissioned to do for his commercial clients, the self-published books allowed his subtly irreverent humour to come forward. In Wild Raspberries (whose title is a nudge to Ingmar Bergman's film Wild Strawberries that had come out two years before), the absurd recipes were imagined by Warhol's friend Suzie Frankfurt to counteract the seriousness of cooking books and the supposedly perfect housewife they depicted. As often with Warhol, he based his drawings on existing ones, in this instance reproductions of fancy French desserts. The directions for cooking however were turned on their heads by Frankfurt, requiring no less than, in some of the recipes, a Carey Cadillac, hearts, fighting fishes, poached brains or orchids and providing, among others, tips for hunting or suggestions as to whom to serve the dish – politicians from the 1930s, Greta Garbo or very thin people.

The books were mostly addressed to a private audience made of friends and family, or to accompany samples of his work to current and potential customers, offering them as carefully wrapped gifts upon each of his visits to their office. This personal intent behind the books' production also explains the fact that the number of the editions were rarely clear or known, as Warhol was not very good, nor keen to keep a record of the numbers.

To produce the books, Warhol started working with Seymour Berlin at the Record Offset Corporation in New York for the printing, and involved his mother in their production. Julia Warhola, an artist herself, had moved to New York City to live with her son in 1952 and she participated in many of his projects in those years, especially hand-writing the texts that often accompanied the books or advertisements he was working on.

Warhol could also count on his assistants and on several friends when it came to colour the prints. In grand 'Warhol's style', he would organise 'colouring parties' at a restaurant and ice cream parlour in Manhattan where together they would hand-apply bright watercolours to each or some of the individual sheets.

Thus, the number of hand-coloured offset lithographs varies greatly from one edition to the other and the one presented here is a particularly good and rare example where all 17 drawings are hand-coloured and beautifully preserved.