Pop Continued: Warhol and the Art of the Perfect Throwaway

The appetite and—more to the point—the market for Warhol ephemera would appear to be a bottomless maw, and there’s no end to the shows and books designed to tempt, if not satisfy, them. “Takes and Outtakes,” timed to celebrate both the 10th anniversary of the Warhol Museum and the publication of Andy Warhol: 365 Takes (Abrams), brings a broad selection of the museum’s archives of art and memorabilia to Ronald Feldman Fine Arts this week. Along with early paintings like Little Electric Chair and Ambulance Disaster, expect Edie Sedgwick drawings, a Valerie Solanas script, and dental molds and suicide photos from Warhol’s personal collection.

The eccentricity, obsessiveness, and relevance of the artist’s collecting impulse are the subject of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21 (Dumont), which details the entire contents of one of the 612 cardboard boxes Warhol filled and filed away. But true ephemera hounds won’t be happy until they get their hands on Red Books (Steidl), the catalog to a show of Warhol’s previously unexhibited Polaroids at Pace/MacGill. The 11 small, spiral-bound red albums on display were compiled mostly in the early ’70s and include individual books devoted to a topless Paloma Picasso, a shirtless Mick Jagger, Peter Beard and Lee Radziwell frolicking in Montauk, and a black drag queen named Monique. Average price: $25,000. So neatly boxed facsimiles of all the albums (with appearances by John and Yoko, Caroline Kennedy, Rudolf Nureyev, Giorgio de Chirico, and Joan Didion) are a relative bargain at $95, especially since the gallery is the only source for what could be this summer’s most coveted hostess gift. (When D.A.P. puts the box set into general distribution in September, it’ll be priced at $70.)