It was 1953 when, not long after arriving in New York City, a young artist named Andy Warhol had begun to make his way in the world of commercial illustration. As Arthur Edelman, his former employer, relates in his introductory note, ‘In a hallway of the Empire State Building, outside a shoe manufacturer’s office, stood a young man with Jackson Pollock shoes, a rumpled black suit, a portfolio and a shock of white hair.’ Over the next decade, Warhol created scores of whimsical advertisements for the Edelmans, including a colouring book that could only have come from the mind of Warhol, created especially for clients’ children for Christmas in 1961, and somewhat of a cause célèbre when it was published in 1990. The original edition was only 24pp, but Warhol actually created many more drawings through the mid/late 1950s and early 1960s; this revised edition is extended with many more of these images. A Coloring Book: Drawings by Andy Warhol will amuse a new audience with its delightfully carefree menagerie and mid-century charm.
