The Cabezas Collector or the great occasions of Andy Warhol

Year of publication: 2025

Valoración: Very interesting (like that magazine)

The Cabezas Collector or the great occasions of Andy Warhol. Take now! Title and covered with a brutal power for a text that brings us closer to the figure of one of the, like or not, more relevant artists of the second half of the twentieth century and worldwide famous for the cans of Campbell soups, for the series with the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and also, why not?, For an aesthetic of the most peculiar.

But this approach is not a biographical text or focused on the biographical (in fact, gossip, loving life, its sound “incident” with Valerie Solanas or gossip linked to Factory Oa Studio 54 are left out (or almost outside) of the text) or in their most famous works. What Laddaga does in his text is to claim a much more complex and multifaceted Warhol than a multidisciplinary and chameleonic artist capable of continuously reinventing himself, of creating from the leftovers, of putting at the level of “decorative” arts and art arts, of joining it around him to the “upper” upper bohemian “.

Thus, following a more or less chronological route, from its sickly childhood in Pittsburgh to its last collaboration with Basquiat, the central space is occupied by a work that covers painting, photography, cinema and literature and that drinks from influences that go from now more or less mainstream people such as the Bauhaus, Picasso, Paul Klee, Capote or Duchamp people Grosz, Alice Neel or Louise Nevelson, through Byzantine art, her mother’s bedspreads or Antonioni’s films.

All this may sound to brave, thick things, destined for initiated. Nothing is further from reality. If neither Warhol himself saw his work as something especially “deep”, but rather he thought it was essentially decorative (1/3 comedy, 1/3 sex and 1/3 art), it will not be Laddaga who takes the opposite. Obviously, there is analysis and interpretation of his works, of his insertion in a particular historical and social context, etc., but Laddaga has the ability to make it affordable for a mere “amateur.” Surely a connoisseur From the artist’s work previously known as Andrew Warhola, he spends it as a dwarf reading critics, articles of the time, etc., but it is not necessary to be an expert to enjoy a text that is a catalog of art of the twentieth century, with all its experiments, irregularities and dissonances, much more interesting (for me) than the most academic and perfect executions.

PS 1: It is strongly recommended to have the computer on hand to consult the 200,000 artistic references of the book.

PS 2: How strange that the people of the Chanante hour did not make a celebrities with Andy Warhol!