Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties

Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties is a fascinating look at the avant-garde group that came together--from 1964 to 1968--as Andy Warhol's Silver Factory, a cast that included Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Steven Watson follows their diverse lives from childhood through their Factory years. He shows how this ever-changing mix of artists and poets, musicians and filmmakers, drag queens, society figures, and fashion models, all interacted at the Factory to create more than 500 films, the Velvet Underground, paintings and sculpture, and thousands of photographs.

Between 1961 and 1964 Warhol produced his most iconic art: the Flower paintings, the Marilyns, the Campbell's Soup Can paintings, and the Brillo Boxes. But it was his films--Sleep, Kiss, Empire, The Chelsea Girls, and Vinyl--that constituted his most prolific output in the mid-1960s, and with this book Watson points up the important and little-known interaction of the Factory with the New York avant-garde film world. Watson sets his story in the context of the revolutionary milieu of 1960s New York: the opening of Paul Young's Paraphernalia, Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, Max's Kansas City, and the Beautiful People Party at the Factory, among many other events.

Interspersed throughout are Watson's trademark sociogram, more than 130 black-and-white photographs--some never before seen--and many sidebars of quotes and slang that help define the Warholian world. With Factory Made, Watson has focused on a moment that transformed the art and style of a generation.

Author: Steven Watson
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 10/21/2003
Pages: 512
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.44lbs
Size: 9.46h x 7.74w x 1.72d
ISBN: 9780679423720


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/29/2003 pg. 57
Booklist 11/01/2003 pg. 472
Library Journal 01/01/2004 pg. 106
New York Times 02/15/2004 pg. 24
Lambda Book Report 05/01/2004 pg. 14

About the Author
Steven Watson is a cultural historian and documentary filmmaker. His other books include Strange Bedfellows, The Harlem Renaissance, The Birth of the Beat Generation, and Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. He lives in New York City.


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