Warhol’s Little Red Face Book / Hyperallergic

LOS ANGELES — The name Andy Warhol is synonymous with Pop art, a movement often written off as apolitical and shallow in its engagement with American culture. Reflections of this assumption are all contained in Little Red Book #296, an album of 18 images that was recently gifted to Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art and makes up just one aspect of the exhibition Fever & Flash: Pop in the 1970s, curated by Lauren Ross and opening this weekend. At first glance, the Polaroids in this book appear to be a collection of amateur snapshots that could have been taken by my Jewish grandmother Edna during one of herclassic family dinner parties. But looking longer, this much becomes clear: Warhol was far more calculated and way less sentimental than most people’s grandmas. He didn’t throw the party. He went to it.

In 1971, Warhol picked up the Polaroid Big Shot, which was designed specifically for taking portraits. He took the camera with him everywhere, mastering its mechanical shutter and square format, and making portraits of his social world. His Red Book Polaroid series, from 1974–75, comprises 36 photographs that he later used as sources for his large-scale screenprints. But his Little Red Books came before that. They are collections of images that precede the bigger moments. And there are hundreds of them. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts gifted Little Red Book #22 to the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has Little Red Book #138 in its possession. Tulsa got #296.

Read the full story on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/145746/warhols-little-red-face-book/