Andy Warhol

This catalogue accompanies Andy Warhol Retrospective, the touring survey that MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) presented in 2002, running through August 18 of that year. The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin organized the exhibition. It assembled roughly 200 works spanning Warhol's career, from his early 1940s drawings through 1986, the year before his death.

The show covered his best-known series: Campbell's Soup Cans, Marilyn, Jackie, Mao, and Flowers. It also included the Disaster paintings of the 1960s, Suicide, Electric Chair, and Car Crash, plus the rarely shown Most Wanted Men. Early hand-painted black-and-white canvases and 1940s drawings appeared alongside the mature silkscreen work, and the late Self-Portraits closed the arc. Heiner Bastian edited the accompanying book. Kirk Varnedoe and Donna De Salvo contributed essays, with additional texts by Peter-Klaus Schuster and Antje Dallmann, following the same path from student drawings to final years.

For MOCA, the retrospective gave a full-career account of an artist its collection and program had already engaged with in pieces. It set the hand-painted origins of Pop against the mechanized image-making that came to define it.